  In string theory, black holes have a minimum mass below which they transition
into highly excited long and jagged strings --- ``string balls''. These are the
stringy progenitors of black holes; because they are lighter, in theories of
TeV-gravity, they may be more accessible to the LHC or the VLHC. They share
some of the characteristics of black holes, such as large production cross
sections. Furthermore, they evaporate thermally at the Hagedorn temperature and
give rise to high-multiplicity events containing hard primary photons and
charged leptons, which have negligible standard-model background.
