These hypothetical black holes would be extraordinarily small and short-lived. If they could be produced at the LHC, their existence might help physicists address some of the deepest unanswered questions about spacetime and gravity. The search also gave researchers a chance to test a new technique for finding rare and previously unknown particles.

“Had we found evidence, we could have begun to directly study quantum gravity,” said Tamas Vami, a researcher in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment who is conducting his postdoctoral work under the guidance of UCSB physics professor Joe Incandela. “It’s a step toward unifying all of the known fundamental forces, which has been a goal of physicists for more than a century.”

The search did not uncover evidence of quantum black holes. But in particle physics, failing to detect something can still provide important information by ruling out where it could exist.

“It’s not a dead-end,” said Incandela Lab graduate student researcher Danyi Zhang. “The result is an exclusion limit, which is a real, publishable statement: ‘If this thing existed with these properties, we’d have seen it. We didn’t, so we can rule it out here.’ That’s genuine knowledge about how the universe works.”

Why Missing Black Holes Still Matter

One of the major puzzles in fundamental physics involves the enormous difference between the scale of the universe we experience and the Planck scale, the fundamental energy scale associated with quantum gravity.

Some physicists have proposed that new physics or an undiscovered symmetry could explain this difference. Crucially, some of those effects might appear at energy levels the LHC can reach.

Years of experiments have already eliminated many theoretical possibilities, and the continued absence of clear signs of new physics at the LHC has become a major challenge for researchers. But similar situations have happened before. Periods in which existing theories struggled to explain observations have sometimes led to radically new frameworks, including Einstein’s theory of relativity.

For that reason, the researchers say null results are an important part of scientific progress. Each one reduces the number of viable possibilities and helps determine where future experiments should look.

Vami’s and Zhang’s results are published in the journal Progress in High Energy Physics (PHEP).

Could the LHC Create Tiny Black Holes?

The possibility of producing black holes at the LHC emerged roughly two decades ago. Physicists proposed that if enough energy were concentrated into an extremely small region, and if extra spatial dimensions (which are already required in string theory) exist, then quantum black holes might form during the trillions of proton-proton collisions created by the accelerator.

These objects would be nothing like the enormous astrophysical black holes found throughout the universe.

“They wouldn’t stick around very long — if you made one, it would disintegrate immediately,” said UCSB physics theorist Steven Giddings, an expert in the paradoxical implications of combining quantum mechanics with gravity, and one of a few scientists at the time who proposed that under certain conditions these tiny voids in spacetime could exist.

When scientists first discussed the possibility, the idea became widely misunderstood. Public concerns focused on the possibility that the LHC might create stable black holes, even though the quantum black holes being considered by physicists would disappear almost instantly.

“People were more focused on the classical behavior of black holes,” said Giddings, referring to those massive voids in spacetime, areas of extreme gravity that can eat whole stars, grow, merge.

The hypothetical black holes produced at the LHC would instead arise from proton-proton collisions combined with the effects of extra spatial dimensions that have never been observed.

Hidden Dimensions Could Make Gravity Stronger

Creating any black hole requires squeezing a large amount of energy into an extremely small region.

“So what do you need to make a black hole? Well, you have to compress some energy into a really small volume,” Giddings explained.

That “really small volume” might extend through two or more hypothetical spatial dimensions that are too small for humans to detect within our 3 + 1 dimension reality.

Such extra dimensions have been proposed as one possible answer to the hierarchy problem, a longstanding question in physics that asks why gravity is dramatically weaker than the other fundamental forces.

One possibility is that gravity is not intrinsically as weak as it appears. Instead, some of its strength could be “leaking” into these extra dimensions. If that were true, the Planck scale could be much closer to the energy scales physicists can experimentally reach.

“Basically, the gravitational force gets stronger, faster, as you go to shorter distances,” Giddings said.

But stronger gravity alone would not be enough. Scientists would also need to concentrate enormous energy into an exceptionally small volume.

That is where the Large Hadron Collider becomes important.

Colliding Particles at Extreme Energies

The LHC accelerates protons to tremendous energies before smashing them together. These collisions give physicists access to extremely small distance scales.

“At the LHC, we’re colliding particles at extremely high energy, which corresponds to tiny distance scales,” Incandela said. “As with microscopy, higher energies mean smaller wavelengths, allowing one to probe smaller distances.”

Researchers are probing scales as small as 10-20 meters at the LHC, a distance that is to an atom, what an atom is to a human.

“The extra dimensions wouldn’t have to be that small,” Incandela continued, “meaning that the LHC proton-proton collisions could be affected by them.”

If gravity became sufficiently strong at those scales and enough energy were concentrated into a tiny enough region, spacetime could theoretically fold in on itself and produce a quantum black hole.

Safety concerns surrounding this idea were eventually addressed through detailed reports and comparisons with ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. These naturally occurring particles have been striking Earth’s upper atmosphere and other astronomical objects at immense energies without producing dangerous effects.

Those comparisons showed that high energy particle collisions do not pose a black hole threat. Any quantum black holes produced under the proposed models would evaporate essentially immediately.

Even so, their extremely brief existence might leave detectable traces in the particles produced as they decay.

Earlier searches by the ATLAS and CMS experiments failed to find such evidence, but those studies had access to much smaller datasets.

With far more collision data now available, researchers could search at higher energies and increase their chances of seeing an exceptionally rare quantum black hole event if such events occur.

Where Quantum Physics Meets Gravity

The search is ultimately connected to one of the biggest unresolved problems in modern physics.

“We have two big theories that describe nature,” Tamas Vami said. “If you want to describe things that are small, you go to quantum field theory. We have the Standard Model to describe all the particles, and it performs exceptionally well in practice. And when you go to the very, very big you have general relativity that would describe how big and massive objects behave.”

Physicists have spent decades trying to combine these frameworks into a single description of nature.

The difficulty is that quantum physics generally describes extremely small objects, while general relativity becomes most important for very massive ones.

The goal is to somehow merge the two theories into a single, unified theory, Vami said, “and that’s really hard to do because you don’t often have a situation which is really tiny but also extremely heavy.”

Microscopic black holes could provide exactly that combination. They would be small enough for quantum effects to become important while also concentrating enough mass and energy for gravity to matter.

Searching for the Signature of a Black Hole

The researchers analyzed CMS detector data collected between 2016 and 2018 and used two approaches to look for evidence of quantum black holes.

One involved a property called sphericity.

“You form a black hole, and it immediately disintegrates. But it has a very spherical decay signature, lots of things going in all directions.”

Another clue would be an unusually large amount of energy in the particles produced by a collision.

“We know that black holes are very high energy,” Danyi Zhang said. “So we basically just take the energy of these particles that are decay products of whatever was created in the collision and sum them together. And if the sum is large enough, we can say that this is the region where we are likely to find the signal.”

Those unusual event patterns also provided an opportunity to use a new analytical method known as “phase-space distance,” developed by UCSB particle theorist Nathaniel Craig and collaborators.

The method works with a machine learning system called a Support Vector Machine, which helps researchers distinguish possible signal events from the enormous background of conventional high energy particle collisions.

In particle physics, “phase space” is a multidimensional mathematical representation incorporating properties such as space, time, energy and momentum into a description of a particle system.

Machine Learning Joins the Search

“We developed the idea of the phase space between events, which can be combined with SVM to help the search,” Craig said.

The method converts the distances between events into a single measurement called an SVM score. Events with larger scores are more likely to resemble the signal scientists are searching for.

This study marked the first time the phase space distance method had been used in a particle physics data analysis.

“We compared phase space distance with the sphericity variable and our conclusion is that phase space distance outperforms sphericity,” Zhang said.

The approach also differs from some “black box” machine learning systems because it is supervised. Researchers can examine the mathematics that produced the result rather than simply accepting an unexplained output.

New Limits on Quantum Black Holes

The search ultimately found no evidence for quantum black hole production.

Based on the theoretical models examined, the result means quantum black holes are unlikely up to about 12 TeV (Tera-electron volts). It also constrains certain theories involving extra spatial dimensions.

Those restrictions are scientifically valuable because they eliminate parts of the range in which these theoretical models could operate.

String theory, for example, assumes a total of 10 dimensions.

“But these measurements say that, assuming the parameters of the theories we considered, you cannot have more than two,” Vami said.

“Theories don’t predict one exact answer,” Zhang added. “They predict a whole range of places a particle could be hiding. Each search clears out part of that range and says ‘not here,’ and over time the map of where new physics could still be, shrinks.”

That process of elimination has repeatedly played an important role in particle physics. The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 only after decades of experiments gradually excluded one energy region after another.

By eliminating possibilities, physicists can improve their theories, develop new models and design better experiments and detectors.

The Mystery of Weak Gravity Remains

For now, the hierarchy problem is still unresolved.

Without extra dimensions, Giddings estimates that particle collisions would need to reach roughly a million billion times the energy currently achieved at the LHC to produce even the smallest black holes, which would have masses measured in micrograms.

“Theorists will continue to generate ideas and maybe we will do better in figuring things out without experimental data, but it will be difficult,” Giddings said.

“The best guide is experimental data, and that’s what we’d really like to have,” he said, to study quantum gravity, which he calls “the most profound problem in theoretical physics.”

By testing collisions at some of the highest energies currently available, Vami and Zhang have been able to push the Standard Model toward its limits.

Their results provide new guidance for future searches for quantum black holes as a possible solution to the hierarchy problem. Just as importantly, the work shows that the phase space distance method could be used more broadly to search for unfamiliar particles, unusual interactions and other rare phenomena.

Searching for Another Exotic Phenomenon

The researchers also used the same study to hunt for sphalerons.

Sphalerons are not particles. Instead, they are theoretical unstable configurations of particle fields that, like quantum black holes, would be expected to produce relatively spherical energy patterns.

They could potentially help explain another major mystery: why the universe contains matter.

According to current understanding, the Big Bang should have produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts. Those two forms of matter should then have annihilated one another, leaving behind energy rather than the matter-filled universe we see today.

This mismatch is known as the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem.

Researchers found no evidence of sphaleron processes either. That absence allowed them to place limits on how many particle interactions could potentially involve sphaleron transitions.

A More Powerful LHC Is Coming

Future experiments could push the search considerably further.

“We will be putting constraints on what theories can be true,” said Zhang, who is looking forward to new data obtained in the future at the LHC, which is currently shut down for the installation of an ambitious set of upgrades.

The future High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) will provide scientists with far larger datasets and more opportunities to detect extremely rare events.

Those experiments will allow researchers “to study fundamental components of matter in more detail,” including processes that may reveal how the early universe evolved.

By summer, the effects of the weak 2025-2026 mountain snowpack in the Upper Colorado Basin had reached Lake Powell. With far less snowmelt than usual feeding the Colorado River, inflows dwindled, and the second-largest reservoir in the United States fell to record-low levels in late August and early September.

Lake Powell Falls Below Its Previous Record

Satellite images captured the dramatic change in Lake Powell near Glen Canyon Dam. The images were collected by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) aboard the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite on September 1, 2017 (left), and September 10, 2026 (right).

In the 2026 image, Lake Powell’s water surface stood at 3,517.24 feet. Roughly a month earlier, the reservoir had already fallen below its previous record low of 3,519.92 feet, which was set on April 13, 2023. Water levels continued declining into early September.

The 2017 image provides a striking contrast, showing Lake Powell during one of its highest water levels of the past decade.

Lake Mead Also Reaches Record Lows

The Colorado River first flows into Lake Powell before continuing downstream toward Lake Mead. In August 2026, Lake Mead also reached record-low levels.

The river system, managed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and other agencies, is a critical source of both water and electricity across the Southwest. More than 40 million people depend on it, including residents of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The river also supplies water to roughly 5 million acres of farmland.

Why Snow Matters So Much to the Colorado River

Much of the Colorado Basin is arid or semi-arid, which makes mountain snow especially important. A substantial share of the Colorado River’s annual flow begins as snow that accumulates at high elevations during winter and melts during spring and early summer.

The Upper Colorado Basin, along with many mountainous regions across the U.S. West, received unusually little snow during winter 2025-2026. The shortage amounted to a snow drought.

Periods of record warmth made conditions worse by further reducing the snowpack. As a result, the spring snowmelt delivered far less water to reservoirs than it normally would, providing little relief for already depleted lake levels.

Emergency Steps to Protect Lake Powell

In April 2026, the USBR began taking measures to stabilize Lake Powell and prevent the reservoir from dropping below the elevation required for hydropower generation.

Without intervention, the agency considered that possibility realistic by August 2026.

To help support Lake Powell, USBR began releasing additional water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in northern Utah and southern Wyoming. At the same time, officials reduced the amount of water being released from Lake Powell into Lake Mead.

The agency also canceled a “controlled flood” planned for April that was intended to rebuild sandbars used as fish habitat. In August, officials also skipped a “cool mix” release designed to help protect native species.

A Megadrought Continues to Strain the Southwest

Drought in the U.S. Southwest has persisted since around the beginning of the 21st century. Experts have described the prolonged dry period as a megadrought, and it continues to place intense pressure on the region’s limited water supplies.

NASA-supported projects and monitoring systems are giving water managers and other decision-makers across the Colorado Basin more detailed information about drought conditions and how they are changing.

At the Colorado River’s headwaters, for example, a dashboard built around the Western Land Data Assimilation System (WLDAS) provides real-time visualizations of soil moisture, snow water equivalent, and evapotranspiration. The information helps support Colorado’s drought task force and contributes to weekly U.S. Drought Monitor maps.

Satellite Data Helps Track Drought Across the Basin

Closer to Lake Powell, the Drought Severity Evaluation Tool, co-developed with the Navajo Nation, allows leaders to track localized drought indicators, precipitation patterns, and vegetation health across tribal lands. (With funding from NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System, its adoption expanded to Oklahoma’s Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations in 2025.)

Another resource, the Colorado River Integrated Assessment tool, was developed by Arizona State University researchers in partnership with the Central Arizona Project. It brings together improved modeling with NASA-satellite-validated measurements of snowpack, surface and groundwater storage, soil moisture, and other conditions throughout the Colorado River Basin in a single interactive system.