Semiclassical suppression of black hole production in particle collisions

Abstract It is argued that the cross section for production of large black holes, for which a semiclassical description is applicable, cannot be given by the geometric area of the black hole horizon, as claimed recently in the literature. Rather the production cross section in a few-particle collision is suppressed by at least a factor exp(− I E ) with I E being the Gibbons–Hawking (Euclidean) action for the black hole. Thus only essentially non-classical small black holes with mass of the order of the Planck mass can possibly be produced in few-particle collisions at trans-Planckian energies.