Session S8 - Particles and Fields.
FOCUS session, Saturday afternoon, October 25
LaPaz, Memorial Union
One of the most intriguing features of string thermodynamics is the phenomenon of thermal duality, which relates the physics at temperature T to the physics at inverse temperature 1/T. Unfortunately, the classical definitions of thermodynamic quantities such as entropy and specific heat are not invariant under thermal duality transformations. In this talk, I will discuss several novel approaches towards dealing with this issue. One of these involves extending the usual definition of entropy by introducing additional terms that are suppressed by powers of the string scale. At high temperatures, however, these terms become significant and lead to a variety of surprising new phenomena. This talk reports on work done in collaboration with my Ph.D. advisor, Keith Dienes.