Towards an S-matrix description of gravitational collapse

By D. Amati, M. Ciafaloni, G. Veneziano. 2007

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extending our previous results on trans-Planckian (Gs >> ) scattering of light particles in quantum string-gravity we present a calculation of the corresponding S-matrix from the region of large impact parameters (b >> G(s)1/2>λs) down to the regime where classical gravitational collapse is expected to occur. By solving the semiclassical equations of a previously introduced effective-action approximation, we find that the perturbative expansion around the leading eikonal result diverges at a critical value b = bc = O(G(s)1/2), signalling the onset of a new (black-hole related?) regime. We then discuss the main features of our explicitly unitary S-matrix—and of the associated effective metric—down to (and in the vicinity of) b = bc, and present some ideas and results on its extension all the way to the b→0 region. We find that for b < bc the physical field solutions are complex-valued and the S-matrix shows additional absorption, related to a new production mechanism. The field solutions themselves are, surprisingly, everywhere regular, suggesting a quantum-tunneling—rather than a singular-geometry—situation.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9fb1a7e2d920baf022e6a22998c9a741c4f89092

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Citations in the corpus

Black holes in general relativity (2009, background): “(And none of the individual “spacetimes” in the superposition has a horizon [44, 45, 54].”
High-energy gravitational scattering and the general relativistic two-body problem (2017, background): “The analytical estimate of [66] corresponds to C = 21/23−3/4 ≈ 0.”
Radiation reaction from soft theorems (2021, background): “Indeed the unitarity convolution in momentum space diagonalizes in impact parameter space giving (see e.g [43] where the sum is over each massless state in the theory under consideration.”
Minimal Length Scale Scenarios for Quantum Gravity (2012, background): “] found no evidence that the extendedness of the string interferes with black-hole formation. The subject of string scattering in the trans-Planckian regime is subject of ongoing research, see, e.g., [12, 90, 130] and references therein. Let us also brieﬂy mention that the spread of the string just ”
Universality of ultra-relativistic gravitational scattering (2020, background): “We conjecture that this is actually true to all orders in the PM expansion, since the relevant contributions are described by diagrams where the external states emit only gravitons and the two highly boosted lines representing them are connected through a tree-level GR amplitude [24].”
Jerusalem Lectures on Black Holes and Quantum Information (2014, result): “Nonetheless some attempts to study the black hole information problem have been made using perturbative string theory in the bulk, for some preliminary results that go in the direction of non-locality see [64, 190–194], although at this point it is not so clear whether these results actually lead us”