Weak chaos and mixed dynamics in the string S-matrix

Abstract

We investigate chaotic dynamics in tree-level S-matrices describing the scattering of tachyons, photons and gravitons on highly excited open and closed bosonic strings, motivated by the string/black hole complementarity. The eigenphase spacing distribution and other indicators of quantum chaotic scattering suggest that the dynamics is only weakly chaotic, consisting of both regular/Poisson and chaotic/Wigner-Dyson processes. Only for special values of momenta and (for photon scattering) scattering angles do we find strong chaos of random matrix type. These special values correspond to a crossover between two regimes of scattering, dominated by short versus long partitions of the total occupation number of the highly excited string; they also maximize the information entropy of the S-matrix. The lack of strong chaos suggests that perturbative dynamics of highly excited strings can never describe the universal properties and maximal chaos of black hole horizons.

32 pages, 11 figures; this version: minor corrections and clarifications

References in corpus (6)

• Localization of interacting fermions at high temperature
• Universality in Chaos of Particle Motion near Black Hole Horizon
• Chaotic dynamics of strings in charged black hole backgrounds
• Signatures of Chaos in Non-integrable Models of Quantum Field Theory
• Covariant Closed String Coherent States
• Photon emission from an excited string