English

Weak chaos and mixed dynamics in the string S-matrix

High Energy Physics - Theory 2024-04-18 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP Chaotic Dynamics

Abstract

We investigate chaotic dynamics in tree-level S-matrices describing the scattering of tachyons, photons and gravitons on highly excited open and closed bosonic strings, motivated by the string/black hole complementarity. The eigenphase spacing distribution and other indicators of quantum chaotic scattering suggest that the dynamics is only weakly chaotic, consisting of both regular/Poisson and chaotic/Wigner-Dyson processes. Only for special values of momenta and (for photon scattering) scattering angles do we find strong chaos of random matrix type. These special values correspond to a crossover between two regimes of scattering, dominated by short versus long partitions of the total occupation number of the highly excited string; they also maximize the information entropy of the S-matrix. The lack of strong chaos suggests that perturbative dynamics of highly excited strings can never describe the universal properties and maximal chaos of black hole horizons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.02211,
  title  = {Weak chaos and mixed dynamics in the string S-matrix},
  author = {Nikola Savić and Mihailo Čubrović},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.02211},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

32 pages, 11 figures; this version: minor corrections and clarifications

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:08:35.728Z