Aspects of Planckian scattering beyond the eikonal

Abstract

We discuss an approach to compute two-particle scattering amplitudes for spinless light particles colliding at Planckian centre-of-mass energies, with increasing momentum transfer away from the eikonal limit. The leading corrections to the eikonal amplitude, in our 'external metric' approach, are shown to be vanishingly small in the limit of the source particle mass going to zero. For massless charged particles, the electromagnetic and gravitational interactions decouple in the eikonal limit, hut mix non-trivially for the leading order corrections.