High-energy string-brane scattering: leading eikonal and beyond

Abstract

We extend previous techniques for calculations of transplanckian-energy string-string collisions to the high-energy scattering of massless closed strings from a stack of N Dp-branes in Minkowski spacetime. We show that an effective non-trivial metric emerges from the string scattering amplitudes by comparing them against the semiclassical dynamics of high-energy strings in the extremal p-brane background. By changing the energy, impact parameter and effective open string coupling, we are able to explore various interesting regimes and to reproduce classical expectations, including tidal-force excitations, even beyond the leading-eikonal approximation.

40 pages, 5 figures, v2: minor corrections, new appendix with a discussion of the Feynman diagrams contributing to the scattering amplitude in the field theory limit