Ultrarelativistic Particle Collisions

We present results from numerical solution of the Einstein field equations describing the head-on collision of two solitons boosted to ultrarelativistic energies. We show, for the first time, that at sufficiently high energies the collision leads to black hole formation, consistent with hoop-conjecture arguments. This implies that the nonlinear gravitational interaction between the kinetic energy of the solitons causes gravitational collapse, and that arguments for black hole formation in super-Planck scale particle collisions are robust.