A Proposal for Altering the Unification Scale in String Theory

Abstract

An ensemble of short open strings in equilibrium with the heat bath provided by the Euclidean worldvolume of a stack of Dbranes undergoes a thermal phase transition to a long string phase. The transition temperature is just below the string scale. We point out that this phenomenon provides a simple mechanism within open and closed string theories for altering the strong-electro-weak coupling unification scale relative to the fundamental closed string mass scale in spacetimes with external electromagnetic background.

Latex, 7pgs. v5 Minor changes to main paper. Note added, following recent clarification of the first-order deconfining phase transition to a long string phase in the low energy finite temperature supersymmetric gauge theory limit (hep-th/0409301). Updated references. v6 Eq2 corrected

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