Scattering of Macroscopic Heterotic Strings

Abstract

We show that macroscopic heterotic strings, formulated as strings which wind around a compact direction of finite but macroscopic extent, exhibit non-trivial scattering at low energies. This occurs at order velocity squared and may thus be described as geodesic motion on a moduli space with a non-trivial metric which we construct. Our result is in agreement with a direct calculation of the string scattering amplitude.