The superstring Hagedorn temperature in a pp-wave background

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermodynamics of superstrings in specific backgrounds, accurately computing the partition function and analyzing the Hagedorn temperature, with implications for holographic dualities and string phase transitions.

Contribution

It provides an exact computation of the superstring partition function in a pp-wave background and clarifies the Hagedorn temperature behavior in various flux limits.

Findings

Exact partition function differs slightly from previous results.

Clarification of Hagedorn temperature limits in RR flux regimes.

Insights into string thermodynamics in AdS3 x S3 x T4 geometries.

Abstract

The thermodynamics of type IIB superstring theory in the maximally supersymmetric plane wave background is studied. We compute the thermodynamic partition function for non-interacting strings exactly and the result differs slightly from previous computations. We clarify some of the issues related to the Hagedorn temperature in the limits of small and large constant RR 5-form. We study the thermodynamic behavior of strings in the case of $AdS_3 \times S^3 \times T^4$ geometries in the presence of NS-NS and RR 3-form backgrounds. We also comment on the relationship of string thermodynamics and the thermodynamic behavior of the sector of Yang-Mills theory which is the holographic dual of the string theory.