Asymptotic Freedom and Dirichlet String Theory

Fixed angle scattering at high energy in a string theory with boundaries satisfying Dirichlet conditions (Dirichlet strings) inD = 4 is shown to have logarithmic dependence on energy, in addition to the power-like behavior known before. High temperature free energy also depends logarithmically on temperature. Such a result could provide a matching mechanism between strings at long distance and asymptotic freedom at short distance, which is necessary for the reformulation of large-N QCD as a string theory. In order to reformulate the large-N QCD [1] as a string theory, assuming it is possible at all, we must find a string theory that contains only massive excitations (for pure QCD) and shares the characteristic features of asymptotic freedom, such as partonic behavior and logarithmic violation of scaling at high energy. The critical string theories we are mostly familiar with fail to meet theses two requirements: they contain massless gravitons and massless Yang-Mill particles, and fixed angle scattering falls off exponentially with total energy. Liouville theory [2] has been argued to be irrelevant for the problem of QCD [3], meanwhile the effective string picture advocated in [4], which without doubt is correct for long strings, has problems at short distances. Rigid strings [5] at first sight seem to give the right behavior at high energy and high temperature, but they have the wrong sign of free energy at high temperature as compared with QCD [6], and furthermore there are problems with unitarity [7]. Another simple yet non-trivial modification of short distance behavior of strings is to add world-sheet boundaries satisfying Dirichlet boundary conditions – each boundary is mapped to a single point in space-time and the position is then integrated over. Such a theory was originally proposed as an off-shell extension of closed string amplitudes [8]. Meanwhile the point-like states of the Dirichlet boundaries were proven to produce powerlike behavior of fixed angle scattering at high energy [9]. The point-like structure was then linked to partons. Developments of the Dirichlet string theory in modern language can be found in [10]. Recently Green [11] points out that at high temperature the Dirichlet boundaries produce a free energy similar to that of the large-N QCD found by Polchinski[6]. Namely, in QCD the free energy of a long string per unit length goes as μQCD(β)/L 2 ∼ − (β)N π2β4 , (1)