The collision of plane waves corresponding to massless states of closed string is considered in D-dimensional space-time. The reduced tree level effective action is known to be manifestly O (d, d) invariant, d being the number of transverse spatial dimensions in the collision process. We adopt a coset space reformulation of the effective two-dimensional theory and discuss the relation of this process with classical integrable systems in two dimensions in the presence of gravity. We show how it is possible to generate new backgrounds for the scattering process, from known background solutions to the equations of motion, in the coset reformulation. We present explicit calculations for the case of four space-time dimensions as an illustrative example. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science BN. All rights reserved. References: 32
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