When the most powerful particle accelerator in the world goes online in Geneva in 2007, it may produce tiny black holes, a find that would rock the physics world .  Here's how it would look on scientists' computer screens.
 

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A SLICE OF THE MACHINE


When complete, the Large Hadron Collider will be a 17-mile-long circular tunnel, depicted here in a vertical cross section. Beams of protons will slam together at energies of 14 trillion electron volts, resulting in a billion particle collisions per second.

PARTICLE CHECKPOINTS

A concentric array of detectors senses the different subatomic particles emerging from the main collision. Scientists hope the collider will reveal some of the more exotic entities predicted to exist, like supersymmetric particles, the Higgs boson, and miniature black holes.

EXTERNAL FORCES

Mini black holes require collisions at energies greater than humans can produce. For the collider to create them, additional energy must come from somewhere outside the known universe, evidence that other dimensions are not just theory.

LIGHT SIGNALS

Because a mini black hole should evaporate into light particles, electrons (yellow) and photons (green) may also appear in abundance. Most of the particles will be hadrons (red), quarks that fragment and become pions, kaons, neutrons, and protons.

DATA FOUNTAIN

A normal proton collision might produce a couple of streamlined jets of 100 or 200 particles. A black hole would destroy all symmetry and instead generate a telltale spray of thousands of particles.

X HOLE SHEBANG

If created, a mini black hole would appear here. It would be one-millionth the size of an atomic nucleus, billions of times hotter than the sun, and last a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second—hopefully too brief to swallow matter around it.