The chaotic emergence of thermalization in highly excited string decays

TL;DR

This paper investigates how highly excited strings decay into less excited states, revealing a chaotic process that leads to thermalization and a greybody emission spectrum through an analytic microstate analysis.

Contribution

It provides a novel analytic framework for describing string decay microstates and identifies the chaotic origin of thermal effects in highly excited string interactions.

Findings

Decay spectrum matches greybody emission

Thermal effects originate from chaos in microstates

Analytic description discriminates microstate structures

Abstract

We analyse the most general process of a generic highly excited string that decays into a less excited, yet generic, highly excited string emitting a tachyon. We provide a simple and compact analytic description of the decay process which discriminates between and within the structure of every single microstate of the initial and final highly excited string. Taking into account the random nature of the decay process we extract the energy spectrum of highly excited strings, microstate by microstate, finding a behavior which corresponds to the greybody emission spectrum. In addition, by exploiting the analytic control of the decay process, we identify the origin of thermal effects which are triggered by the chaotic nature of the highly excited string interactions modeled by the microstates structure.