The heterotic string at high temperature (or with strong supersymmetry breaking)

Abstract

Perturbative heterotic string theory develops a single complex tachyonic mode beyond the Hagedorn temperature. We calculate the quartic effective potential for this tachyonic mode at the critical temperature. Equivalently, we determine the quartic effective potential for strong supersymmetric breaking via anti-perdiodic boundary conditions for fermions on a small circle. We give many details of the heterotic tachyon scattering amplitudes, including a unitarity check to fix all normalization constants. We discuss difficulties in obtaining an effective action valid at all radii. We argue that in certain variables, the quartic term in the potential is radius independent. Speculations on the properties of a new strongly curved phase that could occur after tachyon condensation are offered.

22 pages; v2: minor corrections, references added

References in corpus (5)

• Spin-field Interaction Effects and Loop Dynamics in AdS/CFT Duality
• Resolution of Hagedorn singularity in superstrings with gravito-magnetic fluxes
• An Alternative for Moduli Stabilisation
• Non-linear sigma models with anti-de Sitter target spaces
• Vacuum stability, string density of states and the Riemann zeta function

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Perturbative String Thermodynamics near Black Hole Horizons
• Near-Hagedorn Thermodynamics and Random Walks: a General Formalism in Curved Backgrounds
• On the Entropy of Strings and Branes
• Thermal Equilibrium in String Theory in the Hagedorn Phase