EMISSION RATES, THE CORRESPONDENCE PRINCIPLE AND THE INFORMATION PARADOX

When we vary the moduli of a compactification it may become entropical ly favourable at some point for a state of branes and strings to rearr ange itself into a new configuration. We observe that for the elementa ry string with two large charges such a rearrangement happens at the ' correspondence point' where the string becomes a black hole. For small er couplings it is entropically favourable for the excitations to be v ibrations of the string, while for larger couplings the favoured excit ations are pairs of solitonic 5-branes attached to the string; this he lps resolve some recently noted difficulties with matching emission pr operties of the string to emission properties of the black hole. We al so examine the change of state when a black hole is placed in a space- time with an additional compact direction, and the size of this direct ion is varied. These studies suggest a mechanism that might help resol ve the information paradox. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V .