Does gravity effect the results of particle collision?

[Photonwolf]

I do not know if this has been asked here before. I could find nothing about it, so I thought I would ask.

 

If there was to be a large particle collider build out-side of the earths' gravitational pull. Would the results be the same after a collision?

 

Furthermore, if there were to be 3 built around the earth in a way that formed an atom and they were to used at the same time. Theoreticaly, would that do anything? like slow the earths spin or speed it up or destroy everything? just something that crossed my mind.

Edited January 8, 2013 by Photonwolf

[ajb]

Gravity will effect the collisions of particles, they all can interact gravitationally. However, gravity is very much weaker than the electromagnetic, weak and strong force and so will not in general contribute much to any interactions between particles at the energies involved in collider experiments. That is why one does not need to include gravity when testing the standard model of particle physics at CERN. Gravity is swamped by the other forces.

 

The above is fine in weak gravitational fields, like we find throughout the Universe. When we have strong gravitational fields, say for example near the big bang singularity or the singularity at the centre of a black hole, then the effects of gravity are important. Gravity manifests itself as the curvature of space-time and understanding particle physics on curved space-times is complicated, many of the nice mathematics on flat space-times does not quite work on a curved space-time. In particular, different observers will in general not agree on what is the vacuum. This leads to the Unruh effect , particle creation by gravity and Hawking radiation. Note here we can still treat gravity as a classical background.

 

Another related scenario is at high energies, near the Planck scale, which is about 1.22 × 10¹⁹ GeV. At these scales quantum effects of the gravitational field become important. Here things become much more speculative, but for sure there will be consequences for particle collisions at that energy. Presumably, one would need to include gravitions in the calculations, but without a proper quantum theory of gravity it is hard to make concrete statements.

[Photonwolf]

Thank you. Your reply is very helpful.