Spacetime foam at a TeV

Abstract

Motivated by recent interest in TeV-scale gravity and especially by the possibility of fast baryon decay mediated by virtual black holes, we study another dangerous aspect of spacetime foam interactions: lepton flavor violation. We correlate existing limits on gravity- induced decoherence in the neutrino sector with a lower bound on the scale of quantum gravity, and find that if spacetime foam interactions do not allow an S-matrix description the UV cutoff is well beyond the electroweak scale. This suggests that string theory provides the appropriate framework for description of quantum gravity at the TeV-scale.