High Energy Colliders as Black Hole Factories: 
      The End of Short Distance Physics<br> 
Scott Thomas<br> 
Stanford <br><br> 
Abstract<br> 

Particle collisions at energies well above the Planck scale are believed 
to be dominated by the production of black holes.  If the fundamental 
Planck scale is of order a TeV, as suggested in certain theories with 
large extra dimensions, microscopic black holes may be produced at the 
Large Hadron Collider at a rate of up to 1 Hz.  Black hole production 
and decay leads to very dramatic events with a cross section which 
grows with a power of the energy.  Standard hard scattering processes 
such as Drell-Yan or QCD jet production are also exponentially
suppressed.  
Observation of these signatures would provide an experimental confirmation 
of the infrared--ultraviolet nature of quantum gravity, and signal the 
end of experimental investigation of short distances by high
energy scattering.  Black hole production might also be observable
in very high energy cosmic ray neutrino events.