Appears in collection : Damour Fest: Adventures in Gravitation

It has been proposed that a small enough black hole in string theory would transition into a hot oscillating string. We explore whether this transition can happen smoothly in classical string theory. We find evidence that this is the case in the heterotic string theory, but not in the type II string theory. The talk is based on a recent paper by Yiming Chen, JM, and Edward Witten: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08563