Adventures in thermal duality. II. Towards a duality-covariant string thermodynamics

Keith R. Dienes, Michael Lennek

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

In a recent companion paper, we observed that the rules of ordinary thermodynamics generally fail to respect thermal duality, a symmetry of string theory under which the physics at temperature T is related to the physics at the inverse temperature 1/T. Even when the free energy and internal energy exhibit the thermal duality symmetry, the entropy and specific heat are defined in such a way that this symmetry is destroyed. In this paper, we propose a modification of the traditional definitions of these quantities, yielding a manifestly duality-covariant thermodynamics. At low temperatures, these modifications produce corrections to the standard definitions of entropy and specific heat which are suppressed by powers of the string scale. These corrections may nevertheless be important for the full development of a consistent string thermodynamics. We find, for example, that the string-corrected entropy can be smaller than the usual entropy at high temperatures, suggesting a possible connection with the holographic principle. We also discuss some outstanding theoretical issues prompted by our approach.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number126006
Pages (from-to)126006-1-126006-16
JournalPhysical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
Volume70
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2004

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

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