More remarks on suppression of large black hole production in particle collisions

The problem of evaluating the cross section of production of large black holes in particle collisions at trans-Planckian energies is revisited. It is argued that the geometric cross section claimed in the literature would in fact lead to an exponentially growing with energy total cross section dominated by production of many "small" black holes. On the other hand, the semiclassical treatment of this problem, leading to an exponentially suppressed cross section for production of large black holes, requires that in the classical limit the cross section vanishes for massless colliding particles. The latter behavior can in principle be probed by numerical simulations in the classical general relativity. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved,