The collision of two particles in the background of a Sen black hole is studied. With the equations of motion of the particles, the center-of-mass energy is investigated when the collision takes place at the horizon of a Sen black hole. For an extremal Sen black hole, we find that the center-of-mass energy will be arbitrarily high with two conditions: (1) spin a ≠ 0 and (2) one of the colliding particles has the critical angular momentum lc = 2. For a nonextremal Sen black hole, we show that, in order to obtain an unlimited center-of-mass energy, one of the colliding particles should have the critical angular momentum lc′ = 2r+/a (r+ is the radius of the outer horizon for a nonextremal black hole). However, a particle with the angular momentum l = lc′ could not approach the black hole from outside of the horizon through free fall, which implies that the collision with arbitrarily high center-of-mass energy could not take place. Thus, there is an upper bound of the center-of-mass energy for the nonextremal black hole. We also obtain the maximal center-of-mass energy for a near-extremal black hole and the result implies that the Planck-scale energy is hard to be approached. Furthermore, we also consider the back-reaction effects. The result shows that, neglecting the gravitational radiation, it has a weak effect on the center-of-mass energy. However, we argue that the maximum allowed center-of-mass energy will be greatly reduced to below the Planck-scale when the gravitational radiation is included.
