Emission rates, the correspondence principle and the information paradox Original Research Article

When we vary the moduli of a compactification it may become entropically favourable at some point for a state of branes and strings to rearrange itself into a new configuration. We observe that for the elementary string with two large charges such a rearrangement happens at the ‘correspondence point’ where the string becomes a black hole. For smaller couplings it is entropically favourable for the excitations to be vibrations of the string, while for larger couplings the favoured excitations are pairs of solitonic 5-branes attached to the string; this helps resolve some recently noted difficulties with matching emission properties of the string to emission properties of the black hole. We also examine the change of state when a black hole is placed in a space-time with an additional compact direction, and the size of this direction is varied. These studies suggest a mechanism that might help resolve the information paradox.