After the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) discovered the Higgs boson, the last puzzle in particle physics, in 20 12, there was much discussion about what to do next. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world at present, and the energy of colliding particles is about 13 trillion electron volts.
Although this has some physical meanings beyond the standard model, it may not solve some of the biggest problems in particle physics, and physicists need more powerful particle accelerators. In this regard, some physicists have proposed to build a ring collider with energy ten times that of the Large Hadron Collider. However, the cost of building and operating the new particle accelerator will be very high, which makes some physicists wonder whether it is worth the cost.
However, if we can use the particle accelerator that already exists in the universe, this is not the case. Scientists already know that black holes are the most powerful "engines" in the universe. They can produce jets of high-energy particles, which are accelerated to near the speed of light and then leave the black hole.
Unfortunately, any strange high-energy particles produced by a black hole will decay rapidly, so we can't directly observe these particles that may be outside the standard model. However, a recent article published in Physical Review D suggested that we might be able to indirectly observe strange high-energy particles through gravitational waves.
In the past few years, astronomers have observed gravitational waves produced by the merger of black holes and neutron stars. We can observe them with enough sensitivity, so that we can determine some things, such as the initial mass and angular momentum of the merger, and the resulting black hole mass and angular momentum. But we should be able to measure other energy fluctuations in the process of merger more sensitively, which is the starting point of this new paper.
Rotating black holes often provide energy to the surrounding material clouds through a process called "frame drag". If a large amount of dispersed matter around one black hole begins to merge with matter around another black hole, the reference frame drag effect between the two black holes will transfer a lot of energy to matter. This is similar to Voyager 1, which uses Jupiter's gravitational slingshot effect to accelerate to the escape speed of the solar system, but the black hole is much more powerful.
In the process of merging materials around the black hole, superradiation will be generated, which will produce a beam of high-energy particles much stronger than anything we can produce on earth, which may produce strange particles outside the standard model of particle physics. Although we can't directly observe these particles, their energy will affect the gravitational waves produced by black holes. By looking for fluctuations in gravitational waves, we can in turn know the existence of strange particles, or at least know which strange particles may not exist.
Although the black hole particle accelerator is not as accurate as the particle accelerator built by humans on the earth, perhaps by studying gravitational waves, we can learn that there are particles beyond the standard model, which makes it worthwhile to build a new particle accelerator, so as to better understand the development direction of physics.