Confinement and Non-perturbative Tachyons in Brane-Antibrane Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops effective actions for Dp-anti-Dp systems to explain confinement and tachyon condensation, revealing how fundamental strings and gauge symmetry breaking emerge through duality and Higgs mechanisms.

Contribution

It constructs explicit worldvolume and dual actions demonstrating confinement, tachyon condensation, and gauge symmetry breaking in brane-antibrane systems, consistent with string dualities.

Findings

Fundamental strings arise from confined electric flux in the effective action.

Dual description shows a Higgs-Stueckelberg phase for the (p-2)-form field.

Tachyonic objects originate from open D(p-2)-branes stretched between branes.

Abstract

We present a worldvolume effective action suitable for the study of the confined phase of a Dp-anti-Dp system at weak coupling. We identify the mechanism by which the fundamental string arises from this action as a confined electric flux string when the Dp and the anti-Dp annihilate. We construct an explicit dual action, more suitable for the study of the strong coupling regime, and show that it realizes a generalized Higgs-Stueckelberg phase for the (relative) (p-2)-form field dual to the (overall) BI vector. This is the mechanism put forward by Yi and collaborators based on duality arguments in order to explain the breaking of the overall U(1) gauge group at strong coupling. Indeed, in our dual description the Goldstone boson is a (p-3)-form magnetically charged with respect to the overall BI vector field. This indicates that the condensing tachyonic objects originate from open D(p-2)-branes stretched between the brane and the anti-brane. Our results provide an explicit realization of the breaking of the overall U(1) gauge group perturbatively, in a way consistent with the duality symmetries of String Theory.