Fundamental strings as black bodies

Abstract

We show that the decay spectrum of massive excitations in perturbative string theories is thermal when averaged over the (many) initial degenerate states. We first compute the inclusive photon spectrum for open strings at the tree level showing that a black body spectrum with the Hagedorn temperature emerges in the averaging. A similar calculation for a massive closed string state with winding and Kaluza-Klein charges shows that the emitted graviton spectrum is thermal with a “grey-body” factor, which approaches one near extremality. These results uncover a simple physical meaning of the Hagedorn temperature and provide an explicit microscopic derivation of the black body spectrum from a unitary S matrix.