The chaotic emergence of thermalization in highly excited string decays

Abstract

We analyse the most general process of a generic highly excited string that decays into a less excited, yet generic, highly excited string emitting a tachyon. We provide a simple and compact analytic description of the decay process which discriminates between and within the structure of every single microstate of the initial and final highly excited string. Taking into account the random nature of the decay process we extract the energy spectrum of highly excited strings, microstate by microstate, finding a behavior which corresponds to the greybody emission spectrum. In addition, by exploiting the analytic control of the decay process, we identify the origin of thermal effects which are triggered by the chaotic nature of the highly excited string interactions modeled by the microstates structure.