Thermal duality confronts entropy: a new approach towards string thermodynamics?

by Keith Dienes (Arizona)

Tuesday 21 Sept 2004, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

One of the most intriguing features of string thermodynamics is the phenomenon of thermal duality, which relates the physics at temperature T to the physics at the inverse temperature 1/T. Unfortunately, the classical definitions of thermodynamic quantities such as entropy and specific heat are not invariant under thermal duality transformations. In this talk, I will discuss several novel approaches towards dealing with this issue. One of these approaches yields a 'bootstrap' method of extracting possible exact, closed-form solutions for finite-temperature effective potentials in string theory. Another approach involves developing a new, manifestly duality-covariant thermodynamics in which the usual definitions of entropy and specific heat are 'corrected' with additional terms suppressed by powers of the string scale. These can therefore be viewed as alpha'-corrections to the laws of thermodynamics. At high temperatures, these string corrections become significant and lead to a variety of surprising new phenomena as the temperature is increased. These include possible connections with the holographic principle as well as implications for theories with reduced string scales.