# A black hole? Outstanding!

Horatiu Nastase's paper on arXiv suggests that the "fireball" phenomenon observed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (at Brookhaven National Labs) is actually a black hole:
We argue that the fireball observed at RHIC is (the analog of) a dual black hole. In previous works, we have argued that the large $s$ behaviour of the total QCD cross section is due to production of dual black holes, and that in the QCD effective field theory it corresponds to a nonlinear soliton of the pion field. Now we argue that the RHIC fireball is this soliton. We calculate the soliton (black hole) temperature, and get $T=4a /\pi$, with $a$ a nonperturbative constant. For $a=1$, we get $175.76 MeV$, compared to the experimental value of the fireball freeze-out'' of about $176 MeV$. The observed $\eta/ s$ for the fireball is close to the dual value of $1/4\pi$. The Color Glass Condensate'' (CGC) state at the core of the fireball is the pion field soliton, dual to the interior of the black hole. The main interaction between particles in the CGC is a Coulomb potential, due to short range pion exchange, dual to gravitational interaction inside the black hole, deconfining quarks and gluons. Thus RHIC is in a certain sense a string theory testing machine, analyzing the formation and decay of dual black holes, and giving information about the black hole interior.

I don't understand anywhere near enough about advanced particle physics and string theory to process this, but it seems like the kind of thing that would be good for someone, somewhere to really understand.

Peter Steinberg suggests that this is actually fairly safe, at least if you're not standing right on top of it. The idea seems to be that the math for describing what's going on is the same as the math for describing a black hole in some space-time geometry that isn't the same as our space-time geometry. At least that's my extremely sketchy understanding based on Steinberg's post, my undergrad QM classes, and my recent reading of The Elegant Universe.

### October 2012

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