AdS/CFT for Accelerator Physics or Building the Tower of Babel

Abstract

The crucial property of particle colliders is their ability to convert (e.g. electrical) energy into the mass of heavy particles. We have become used to the extremely low efficiency of this conversion and the severe limitations on the mass scale of heavy particles which can be reached. In view of this situation, it appears reasonable to ask whether a perfect conversion machine of this type (a perfect `collider') exists even in principle and whether there is a highest mass scale which can be reached by such a machine. It turns out that, with a number of assumptions, such a machine is conceivable in a world with a strongly-coupled, approximately scale invariant 4d field theory with 5d gravity dual. This machine can be realized as a 5d tower built on the IR brane (in Randall-Sundrum model language). Transporting mass to the tip of this tower is, under certain conditions, equivalent to producing heavy point-like 4d particles. Hence, this can be thought of as a perfect `collider'. In the simple, `pure Randall-Sundrum setting' that we analyse, this machine can only reach a certain maximal energy scale, which falls as the gravity-dual of the 4d QFT approaches the strong coupling domain. On these grounds, one might expect that a no-go theorem (in the spirit of that of Carnot for the conversion of heat into work) exists for weakly-coupled QFTs. We end with some speculations about collider efficiencies at weak coupling, involving possibly the concept of entanglement entropy.