Closed Bosonic String Field Theory at Quintic Order II: Marginal Deformations and Effective Potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure of the effective potential in closed bosonic string field theory at quintic order, revealing multiple vacua including a local minimum and saddle points, and proposing that truncated potentials approximate the full potential well.

Contribution

It verifies the moduli space of marginal deformations at quintic order and develops a fit for quintic amplitudes to compute the effective potential and analyze its vacuum structure.

Findings

Effective potential accurately predicts vacuum structure at order four.

Identifies multiple vacua including a local minimum and saddle points.

Proposes that truncated potentials approximate the full potential effectively.

Abstract

We verify that the dilaton together with one exactly marginal field, form a moduli space of marginal deformations of closed bosonic string field theory to polynomial order five. We use the results of this successful check in order to find the best functional form of a fit of quintic amplitudes. We then use this fit in order to accurately compute the tachyon and dilaton effective potential in the limit of infinite level. We observe that to order four, the effective potential gives unexpectedly accurate results for the vacuum. We are thus led to conjecture that the effective potential, to a given order, is a good approximation to the whole potential including all interactions from the vertices up to this order from the untruncated string field. We then go on and compute the effective potential to order five. We analyze its vacuum structure and find that it has several saddle points, including the Yang-Zwiebach vacuum, but also a local minimum. We discuss the possible physical meanings of these vacua.