World-Sheet Duality, Space-Time Foam, and the Quantum Fate of a Stringy Black Hole

TL;DR

This paper explores the duality between world-sheet spikes and vortices in string theory, revealing how black holes can be viewed as defects in a space-time foam, with implications for their quantum decay and mass loss.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interpretation of Minkowski black holes as world-sheet spikes related by duality to vortices, connecting black hole physics with world-sheet defects and gauge theories.

Findings

Minkowski black holes are modeled as world-sheet spikes and vortices.

High-temperature phase involves a dense vortex plasma with enhanced symmetry.

Quantum effects cause black holes to lose mass and merge with space-time fluctuations.

Abstract

We interpret Minkowski black holes as world-sheet {\it spikes } which are related by world-sheet { \it duality} to {\it vortices } that correspond to Euclidean black holes. These world-sheet defects induce defects in the gauge fields of the corresponding coset Wess-Zumino descriptions of spherically-symmetric black holes. The low-temperature target space-time foam is a Minkowski black hole (spike) plasma with confined Euclidean black holes (vortices). The high-temperature phase is a {\it dense} vortex plasma described by a topological gauge field theory on the world-sheet, which possesses enhanced symmetry as in the target space-time singularity at the core of a black hole. Quantum decay via higher-genus effects induces a back-reaction which causes a Minkowski black hole to lose mass until it is indistinguishable from intrinsic fluctuations in the space-time foam.