No, the LHC will not make contact with parallel universes

Evidence for rainbow gravity by butterfly
production at the LHC.

The most recent news about quantum gravity phenomenology going through the press is that the LHC upon restart at higher energies will make contact with parallel universes, excuse me, with PARALLEL UNIVERSES. The telegraph even wants you to believe that this would disprove the Big Bang, and tomorrow maybe it will cause global warming, cure Alzheimer and lead to the production of butterflies at the LHC, who knows. This story is so obviously nonsense that I thought it would be unnecessary to comment on this, but I have underestimated the willingness of news outlets to promote shallow science, and also the willingness of authors to feed that fire.

This story is based on the paper:

Absence of Black Holes at LHC due to Gravity's Rainbow
Ahmed Farag Ali, Mir Faizal, Mohammed M. Khalil
arXiv:1410.4765 [hep-th]
Phys.Lett. B743 (2015) 295

which just got published in PLB. Let me tell you right away that this paper would not have passed my desk. I'd have returned it as major revisions necessary.

Here is a summary of what they have done. In models with large additional dimensions, the Planck scale, where effects of quantum gravity become important, can be lowered to energies accessible at colliders. This is an old story that was big 15 years ago or so, and I wrote my PhD thesis on this. In the new paper they use a modification of general relativity that is called "rainbow gravity" and revisit the story in this framework.

In rainbow gravity the metric is energy-dependent which it normally is not. This energy-dependence is a non-standard modification that is not confirmed by any evidence. It is neither a theory nor a model, it is just an idea that, despite more than a decade of work, never developed into a proper model. Rainbow gravity has not been shown to be compatible with the standard model. There is no known quantization of this approach and one cannot describe interactions in this framework at all. Moreover, it is known to lead to non-localities with are ruled out already. For what I am concerned, no papers should get published on the topic until these issues have been resolved.

Rainbow gravity enjoys some popularity because it leads to Planck scale effects that can affect the propagation of particles, which could potentially be observable. Alas, no such effects have been found. No such effects have been found if the Planck scale is the normal one! The absolutely last thing you want to do at this point is argue that rainbow gravity should be combined with large extra dimensions, because then its effects would get stronger and probably be ruled out already. At the very least you would have to revisit all existing constraints on modified dispersion relations and reaction thresholds and so on. This isn't even mentioned in the paper.

That isn't all there is to say though. In their paper, the authors also unashamedly claim that such a modification has been predicted by Loop Quantum Gravity, and that it is a natural incorporation of effects found in string theory. Both of these statements are manifestly wrong. Modifications like this have been motivated by, but never been derived from Loop Quantum Gravity. And String Theory gives rise to some kind of minimal length, yes, but certainly not to rainbow gravity; in fact, the expression of the minimal length relation in string theory is known to be incompatible with the one the authors use. The claims that this model they use has some kind of derivation or even a semi-plausible motivation from other theories is just marketing. If I had been a referee of this paper, I would have requested that all these wrong claims be scraped.

In the rest of the paper, the authors then reconsider the emission rate of black holes in extra dimension with the energy-dependent metric.

They erroneously state that the temperature diverges when the mass goes to zero and that it comes to a "catastrophic evaporation". This has been known to be wrong since 20 years. This supposed catastrophic evaporation is due to an incorrect thermodynamical treatment, see for example section 3.1 of this paper. You do not need quantum gravitational effects to avoid this, you just have to get thermodynamics right. Another reason to not publish the paper. To be fair though, this point is pretty irrelevant for the rest of the authors' calculation.

They then argue that rainbow gravity leads to black hole remnants because the temperature of the black hole decreases towards the Planck scale. This isn't so surprising and is something that happens generically in models with modifications at the Planck scale, because they can bring down the final emission rate so that it converges and eventually stops.

The authors then further claim that the modification from rainbow gravity affects the cross-section for black hole production, which is probably correct, or at least not wrong. They then take constraints on the lowered Planck scale from existing searches for gravitons (ie missing energy) that should also be produced in this case. They use the contraints obtained from the graviton limits to say that with these limits, black hole production should not yet have been seen, but might appear in the upcoming LHC runs. They should not of course have used the constaints from a paper that were obtained in a scenario without the rainbow gravity modification, because the production of gravitons would likewise be modified.

Having said all that, the conclusion that they come to that rainbow gravity may lead to black hole remnants and make it more difficult to produce black holes is probably right, but it is nothing new. The reason is that these types of models lead to a generalized uncertainty principle, and all these calculations have been done before in this context. As the authors nicely point out, I wrote a paper already in 2004 saying that black hole production at the LHC should be suppressed if one takes into account that the Planck length acts as a minimal length.

Yes, in my youth I worked on black hole production at the LHC. I gracefully got out of this when it became obvious there wouldn't be black holes at the LHC, some time in 2005. And my paper, I should add, doesn't work with rainbow gravity but with a Lorentz-invariant high-energy deformation that only becomes relevant in the collision region and thus does not affect the propagation of free particles. In other words, in contrast to the model that the authors use, my model is not already ruled out by astrophysical constraints. The relevant aspects of the argument however are quite similar, thus the similar conclusions: If you take into account Planck length effects, it becomes more difficult to squeeze matter together to form a black hole because the additional space-time distortion acts against your efforts. This means you need to invest more energy than you thought to get particles close enough to collapse and form a horizon.

What does any of this have to do with paralell universes? Nothing, really, except that one of the authors, Mir Faizal, told some journalist there is a connection. In the phys.org piece one can read:

""Normally, when people think of the multiverse, they think of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility is actualized," Faizal told Phys.org. "This cannot be tested and so it is philosophy and not science. This is not what we mean by parallel universes. What we mean is real universes in extra dimensions. As gravity can flow out of our universe into the extra dimensions, such a model can be tested by the detection of mini black holes at the LHC. We have calculated the energy at which we expect to detect these mini black holes in gravity's rainbow [a new theory]. If we do detect mini black holes at this energy, then we will know that both gravity's rainbow and extra dimensions are correct."

To begin with rainbow gravity is neither new nor a theory, but that addition seems to be the journalist's fault. For what the parallel universes are concerned, to get these in extra dimensions you would need to have additional branes next to our own one and there is nothing like this in the paper. What this has to do with the multiverse I don't know, that's an entirely different story. Maybe this quote was taken out of context.

Why does the media hype this nonsense? Three reasons I can think of. First, the next LHC startup is near and they're looking for a hook to get the story across. Black holes and parallel universes sound good, regardless of whether this has anything to do with reality. Second, the paper shamelessly overstates the relevance of the investigation, makes claims that are manifestly wrong, and fails to point out the miserable state that the framework they use is in. Third, the authors willingly feed the hype in the press.

Did the topic of rainbow gravity and the author's name, Mir Faizal, sound familiar? That's because I wrote about both only a month ago, when the press was hyping another nonsense story about black holes in rainbow gravity with the same author. In that previous paper they claimed that black holes in rainbow gravity don't have a horizon and nothing was mentioned about them forming remnants. I don't see how these both supposed consequences of rainbow gravity are even compatible with each other. If anything this just reinforces my impression that this isn't physics, it's just fanciful interpretation of algebraic manipulations that have no relation to reality whatsoever.

In summary: The authors work in a framework that combines rainbow gravity with a lowered Planck scale, which is already ruled out. They derive bounds on black hole production using existing data analysis that does not apply in the framework they use. The main conclusion that Planck length effects should suppress black hole production at the LHC is correct, but this has been known since 10 years at least. None of this has anything to do with parallel universes.