2004/12/31 by Juan L. Manes · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2005/03/070
published as JHEP 0503 (2005) 070 · 17 pages. Typos corrected, 1 reference added
arxiv created 2005/04/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
In this paper we analyze a Rutherford type experiment where light probes are inelastically scattered by an ensemble of excited closed strings, and use the corresponding cross section to extract density-density correlators between different pieces of the target string. We find a wide dynamical range where the space-time evolution of typical highly excited closed strings is accurately described as a convolution of brownian motions. Moreover, we show that if we want to obtain the same cross section by coherently scattering probes off a classical background, then this background has to be time-dependent and singular. This provides an example where singularities arise, not as a result of strong gravitational self-interactions, but as a byproduct of the decoherence implicit in effectively describing the string degrees of freedom as a classical background.