Near-Hagedorn Thermodynamics and Random Walks: a General Formalism in Curved Backgrounds

Abstract

In this paper we discuss near-Hagedorn string thermodynamics starting from the explicit path integral derivation recently found by JHEP 0607 (2006) 031. Their result is extended and the validity is checked by comparing with some known exact results. We compare this approach with the first-quantized one-loop result from the low energy effective field theory and establish correction terms to the above result.