Timelike boundary sine-Gordon theory and two-component plasma
Niko Jokela, Esko Keski-Vakkuri, and Jaydeep Majumder

It has long been known that there is a relation between boundary sine-Gordon theory and thermodynamics of charge neutral two-component Coulomb plasma on a unit circle. On the other hand, recently it was found that open string worldsheet description of brane decay can be related to a sequence of points of thermodynamic equilibrium of one-component plasma. Here we consider a different decay process which is specifically described by the timelike boundary sine-Gordon theory. We find time evolution to be mapped to a one-dimensional curve in the space of points of thermal equilibrium of a non-neutral two-component Coulomb plasma. We compute the free energy of the system and find that along the curve it is monotonously decreasing, defining a thermodynamic arrow of time.

© 2008 The American Physical Society.