The Charged Black Hole/String Transition

We generalize the discussion of [1] to charged black holes. For the two dimensional charged black hole, which is described by an exactly solvable worldsheet theory, a transition from the black hole to the string phase occurs when the Hawking temperature of the black hole reaches a limiting value, the temperature of free strings with the same mass and charge. At this point a tachyon winding around euclidean time in the euclidean black hole geometry, which has a non-zero condensate, becomes massless at infinity, and the horizon of the black hole is infinitely smeared. For Reissner-Nordström black holes in d ≥ 4 dimensions, the exact worldsheet CFT is not known, but we propose that it has similar properties. We check that the leading order solution is in good agreement with this proposal, and discuss the expected form of α corrections.