Self-gravitating strings and quantum effects in two-dimensional gravity

Abstract

It is expected that when the string coupling is taken to be sufficiently small, a black hole turns into a bound state of self-gravitating fundamental strings. This state would be described by winding strings wrapping around the Euclidean time circle, known as the Horowitz-Polchinski solution. In this paper, we study such a self-gravitating string configuration in two-dimensional dilaton gravity theories. We first derive an analytic expression of the solution describing a winding string in two-dimensions and investigate in detail the geometry of this solution. Our winding string solution in two dimensions describes the geometry near the surface of the bound state of self-gravitating strings in the large-dimension limit, much like a two-dimensional black hole describes the near horizon geometry of the Schwarzschild black hole in the large-dimension limit. To study quantum effects around self-gravitating strings, we obtain an analytic solution of winding strings in the RST model. In a similar fashion to the Hartle-Hawking vacuum around a black hole, our string solution in the RST model contains the background radiation, whose temperature is the same as that of the winding strings.