A Thermodynamic Interpretation of Time for Rolling Tachyons

Abstract

We show that the open string worldsheet description of brane decay (discussing a specific example of a rolling tachyon background) can be related to a sequence of points of thermodynamic equilibrium of a grand canonical ensemble of point charges on a circle, the Dyson gas. Subsequent instants of time are related to neighboring values of the chemical potential or the average particle number <N>. The free energy of the system decreases in the direction of larger <N> or later times, thus defining a thermodynamic arrow of time. Time evolution equations are mapped to differential equations relating thermal expectation values of certain observables at different points of thermal equilibrium. This suggests some lessons concerning emergence of time from an underlying microscopic structure in which the concept of time is absent.

24 pages

References in corpus (24)

• Large N Field Theories, String Theory and Gravity
• Rolling Tachyon
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• Spacelike Branes
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• Emergent Spacetime
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• The No-ghost Theorem for AdS_3 and the Stringy Exclusion Principle
• The conformal boundary states for SU(2) at level 1
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• On Superstring Disk Amplitudes in a Rolling Tachyon Background
• Closed Superstring Emission from Rolling Tachyon Backgrounds
• Comments on Half S-Branes

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Quantitative approaches to information recovery from black holes
• Spin structures and baby universes
• Timelike Boundary Sine-Gordon Theory and Two-Component Plasma
• N-point functions in rolling tachyon background
• Light-like tachyon condensation in Open String Field Theory
• A Thermodynamic Interpretation of Time for Superstring Rolling Tachyons
• Spacetime Emergence and General Covariance Transmutation
• Electrostatics of Coulomb gas, lattice paths, and discrete polynuclear growth
• Disk Partition Function and Oscillatory Rolling Tachyons
• New results for the SQCD Hilbert series
• Electrostatics approach to closed string pair production from a decaying D-brane
• Moduli space of supersymmetric QCD in the Veneziano limit
• What we don't know about time
• High-energy asymptotics of D-brane decay amplitudes from Coulomb gas electrostatics
• On the origin of thermal string gas
• Time-dependent Backgrounds in String Theory and Dualities