LHC’s answering a lot of questions and also creating a lot more. Earlier this week physicists and scientists at the LHC announced in a paper where some forms of string theory were put to test. When the theory was tested, ideally LHC should have been able to produce small black holes that would instantly decay. But data after the tests showed that there were no black holes nor any decays recorded.
String theory as we know is an attempt to deal with the fact that physics, quantum mechanics and relativity are incompatible. Scientists believe that they couldn’t see these as they were tightly wrapped with in a tiny radius.
Another form of string theory called the ADD model proposed by Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali, says that the unification of the three forces has consequences for gravity. Gravity is considered very weak relative to the other forces. The ADD model makes gravity look weak because of portions of it are caught up in remaining dimensions. This lets LHC use lesser energy to unify the energies and study them.
LHC uses its high energy spectrum to produce black holes. Scientists would use these results to study beyond string theory. However, this result doesn’t mean the death of string theory, only the particular flavor that predicted black holes at these energies. Eliminating some models is a critical process of narrowing down on what’s possible. While most theoretical constructs have a range of possible models and string theory is no different.