CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM GRAVITY EFFECTS FROM PLANCKIAN ENERGY SUPERSTRING COLLISIONS

Abstract

We argue that superstring collisions at Planckian energies and small deflection angles are calculable through an evaluation and resummation of string loops in flat space-time. This leads to a systematic expansion of the collision in classical general relativity and quantum string effects. Our results explicitly show how unitarity constraints are recovered through loop corrections and how flat metric calculations reveal the generation of nontrivial geometries by energetic particles. Finite-string-size effects can be evaluated in some regimes and are found to modify classical relativity expectations even at impact parameters much larger than the string scale. Conversely, we find that, through the resummation of large genus contributions, intermediate distance physics provides important classical relativity effects even in the hard, fixed angle regime.