High-energy collisions of particles, strings, and branes

This chapter summarizes some 25 years of work on the transplanckian-energy collisions of particles, strings, and branes, seen as a theoretical laboratory for understanding how gravity and quantum mechanics can be consistently combined in string theory. The ultimate aim of the exercise is to understand whether and how a consistent quantization of gravity can solve some longstanding paradoxes, such as the apparent loss of information in the production and decay of black holes at a semiclassical level. Considerable progress has been made in understanding the emergence of General Relativity expectations and in evaluating several kinds of quantum string corrections to them in the weak-gravity regime while keeping unitarity manifest. While some progress has also been made in the strong-gravity/gravitational collapse domain, full control of how unitarity works in that regime is still lacking.