Jet extinction from nonperturbative quantum gravity effects

The infrared-ultraviolet properties of quantum gravity suggest on very general grounds that hard short distance scattering processes are highly suppressed for center of mass scattering energies beyond the fundamental Planck scale. If this scale is not too far above the electroweak scale, these nonperturbative quantum gravity effects could be manifest as an extinction of high transverse momentum jets at the LHC. To model these effects, we implement an extinction Monte Carlo modification of the PYTHIA event generator based on a Veneziano form factor with a large absorptive branch cut modification of hard QCD scattering processes. Using this we illustrate the leading effects of extinction on the inclusive jet transverse momentum spectrum at the LHC. We estimate that an extinction mass scale of up to roughly half the center of mass beam collision energy could be probed with high statistics data. Experimental searches at the LHC for jet extinction would be complementary to ongoing searches for the related phenomenon of excess production of high multiplicity final states.