String splitting and strong coupling meson decay

Abstract

We study the decay of high spin mesons using the gauge/string theory correspondence. The rate of the process is calculated by studying the splitting of a macroscopic string intersecting a D-brane. The result is applied to the decay of mesons in N=4 SYM with a small number of flavors and in a gravity dual of large N QCD. In QCD the decay of high spin mesons is found to be heavily suppressed in the regime of validity of the supergravity description.

Comments: 17 pages, 2 figures. V2: References added. V3: Minor corrections