Tachyon Condensation on Separated Brane-Antibrane System

TL;DR

This paper investigates tachyon condensation effects on separated brane-antibrane pairs in superstring theory, analyzing potential minima and dynamic solutions to understand stability and decay processes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of tachyon potential and rolling solutions for separated branes, revealing how separation affects condensation and conformal field theory deformations.

Findings

Potential minimum depends on initial separation, decreasing with higher level truncation.

Rolling tachyon solutions are exactly marginal for separations below a critical distance.

Derived an expression for brane-antibrane pressure as a power series in exponential of time.

Abstract

We study the effect of tachyon condensation on a brane antibrane pair in superstring theory separated in the transverse direction. The static properties of the tachyon potential analyzed using level truncated string field theory reproduces the desired property that the dependence of the minimum value of the potential on the initial distance of separation between the branes decreases as we include higher level terms. The rolling tachyon solution constructed using the conformal field theory methods shows that if the initial separation between the branes is less than a critical distance then the solution is described by an exactly marginal deformation of the original conformal field theory where the correlation functions of the deformed theory are determined completely in terms of the correlation functions of the undeformed theory without any need to regularize the theory. Using this we give an expression for the pressure on the brane-antibrane system as a power series expansion in \exp(C x^0) for an appropriate constant C.