Discovery Reach for Black Hole Production

Models with extra space dimensions, in which our Universe exists on a 4-dimensional brane embedded in a higher dimensional bulk space-time, offer a new way to address outstanding problems in and beyond the Standard Model. In such models the Planck scale in the bulk can be of the order of the electroweak symmetry breaking scale. This allows the coupling strength of gravity to increase to a size similar to the other interactions, opening the way to the unification of gravity and the gauge interactions. The increased strength of gravity in the bulk space-time means that quantum gravity effects would be observable in the TeV energy range reachable by the LHC. The most spectacular phenomenon would be the production of black holes, which would decay semi-classically by Hawking radiation emitting high energy particles. In this note, we discuss the potential for the ATLAS experiment to discover such black holes in the early data (1--1000 pb$^{-1}$).