Finite Temperature Closed Superstring Theory: Infrared Stability and a Minimum Temperature
Year: 2001
Type: preprint
Abstract: We show that flat spacetime is an unstable background of all of the weakly coupled ten-dimensional superstrings under infinitesimal thermal fluctuations in the absence of gauge or antisymmetric tensor field background. We demonstrate this principle in both type II and heterotic closed strings obtaining thermal duality invariant expressions for the normalized generating functional of connected one-loop vacuum graphs and exhibiting a continuous phase transition of the Kosterlitz-Thouless type at the self-dual temperature in the thermodynamic potentials. We find that the type II theory displays the unusual phenomenon of a minimum temperature below which the free string ensemble is unstable. We show that in the presence of a temperature dependent Wilson line the heterotic string theory has a stable and tachyon-free ground state at all temperatures starting from zero with gauge group SO(16)xSO(16). The one-loop contribution to the Helmholtz free energy of free SO(16)xSO(16) heterotic strings vanishes at the self-dual temperature. These results pave the way for an understanding of the spontaneous breaking of thermal duality in closed string theories at strong coupling and the occurence of novel thermal phase transitions in the type I open and closed string theory found in hep-th/0008131 .
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Shyamoli Chaudhuri
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2202743989