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Compactified Strings as Quantum Statistical Partition Function on the Jacobian Torus

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-11-26 v3 Statistical Mechanics Mathematical Physics math.MP Quantum Physics

Abstract

We show that the solitonic contribution of compactified strings corresponds to the quantum statistical partition function of a free particle living on higher dimensional spaces. In the simplest case of a compactification in a circle, the Hamiltonian corresponds to the Laplacian on the 2g-dimensional Jacobian torus associated to the genus g Riemann surface corresponding to the string worldsheet. T-duality leads to a symmetry of the partition function mixing time and temperature. Such a classical/quantum correspondence and T-duality shed some light on the well-known interplay between time and temperature in QFT and classical statistical mechanics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0607133,
  title  = {Compactified Strings as Quantum Statistical Partition Function on the Jacobian Torus},
  author = {Marco Matone and Paolo Pasti and Sergey Shadchin and Roberto Volpato},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0607133},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

10 pages, typos corrected, minor changes; to appear in Physical Review Letters