A search for microscopic black holes, string balls, and sphalerons in proton-proton collisions at = 13 TeV
Using 138 fb⁻¹ of proton-proton collision data at 13 TeV collected by the CMS detector, this study presents model-independent and model-dependent searches that exclude semiclassical black holes and string balls with masses below approximately 8.4–11.4 TeV and 9.0–10.7 TeV, respectively, while setting a 95% confidence level upper limit of 0.0034 on the fraction of quark-quark interactions producing electroweak sphalerons above 9 TeV.