Chaotic scattering of highly excited strings

Understand

Motivated by the desire to understand chaos in the $S$-matrix of string theory, we study tree level scattering amplitudes involving highly excited strings.

• While the amplitudes for scattering of light strings have been a hallmark of string theory since its early days, scattering of excited strings has been far less studied.
• Recent results on black hole chaos, combined with the correspondence principle between black holes and strings, suggest that the amplitudes have a rich structure.
• We review the procedure by which an excited string is formed by repeatedly scattering photons off of an initial tachyon (the DDF formalism).