Excitations of D-strings, entropy and duality

Abstract

We examine the BPS and low energy non-BPS excitations of the D-string in terms of open strings that travel on the D-string. We use this to study the energy thresholds for exciting a long D-string, for arbitrary winding number. We also compute the leading correction to the entropy from non-BPS states for a long D-string, and observe the relation of all these quantities with the corresponding quantities for the elementary string.