Finite Temperature Closed Superstring Theory

Abstract

We find that the gas of IIA strings undergoes a phase transition into a gas of IIB strings at the self-dual temperature. A gas of free heterotic strings undergoes a Kosterlitz-Thouless duality transition with positive free energy and positive specific heat but vanishing internal energy at criticality. We examine the consequences of requiring a tachyon-free thermal string spectrum. We show that in the absence of Ramond-Ramond fluxes the IIA and IIB string ensembles are thermodynamically ill-defined. The 10D heterotic superstrings have nonabelian gauge fields and in the presence of a temperature dependent Wilson line background are found to share a stable and tachyon-free ground state at all temperatures starting from zero with gauge group SO(16)xSO(16). The internal energy of the heterotic string is a monotonically increasing function of temperature with a stable and supersymmetric zero temperature limit. Our results point to the necessity of gauge fields in a viable weakly coupled superstring theory. Note Added (Sep 2005).

Note Added (Sep 2005)

References in corpus (10)

• Dirichlet-Branes and Ramond-Ramond Charges
• A Large-N Reduced Model as Superstring
• Don't Panic! Closed String Tachyons in ALE Spacetimes
• Pair Creation of Dilaton Black Holes
• D-Branes and Dual Gauge Theories in Type 0 String Theory
• Maximally Supersymmetric String Theories in D<10
• Vacuum Energy Cancellation in a Non-supersymmetric String
• Duality without Supersymmetry: The Case of the SO(16)xSO(16) String
• Tachyon-free Orientifolds of Type 0B Strings in Various Dimensions
• Supersymmetric Pair Correlation Function of Wilson Loops