Planckian scattering of D-branes

Abstract

We consider the gravitational scattering of point particles in four dimensions, at Planckian centre of mass energy and low momentum transfer, or the eikonal approximation. The scattering amplitude can be exactly computed by modelling point particles by very generic metrics. A class of such metrics are black hole solutions obtained from dimensional reduction of p-brane solutions with one or more Ramond-Ramond charges in string theory. At weak string coupling, such black holes are replaced by a collection of wrapped D-branes. Thus, we investigate eikonal scattering at weak coupling by modelling the point particles by wrapped D-branes and show that the amplitudes exactly match the corresponding amplitude found at strong coupling. We extend the calculation for scattering of charged particles.