Black hole production at the CERN LHC: String balls and black holes from pp and lead-lead collisions

If the fundamental Planck scale is near a TeV, then parton collisions with high enough center-of-mass energy should produce black holes. The production rate for such black holes at the CERN LHC has been extensively studied for the case of a proton-proton collision. In this paper, we extend this analysis to a lead-lead collision at LHC. We find that the cross section for small black holes which may in principle be produced in such a collision is either enhanced or suppressed, depending upon the black hole mass. For example, for black holes with a mass around 3 TeV we find that the differential black hole production cross section, dσ/dM, in a typical lead-lead collision is up to 90 times larger than that for black holes produced in a typical proton-proton collision. We also discuss the cross sections for ``string ball'' production in these collisions. For string balls of mass about 1 (2) TeV, we find that the differential production cross section in a typical lead-lead collision may be enhanced by a factor up to 3300 (850) times that of a proton-proton collision at LHC.