Winding effects on brane/anti-brane pairs

TL;DR

This paper develops a tachyon effective action for brane/anti-brane pairs separated along a compact dimension, incorporating winding effects to better understand inhomogeneous tachyon decay and its implications for holographic QCD models.

Contribution

It introduces a new tachyon effective action accounting for transverse scalars and winding modes, applied to brane configurations relevant for holographic QCD.

Findings

Winding modes lower the system's energy compared to zero-winding truncation.

The approach models inhomogeneous tachyon decay in brane/anti-brane systems.

Application to the Sakai-Sugimoto model shows improved effective action.

Abstract

We study a brane/anti-brane configuration which is separated along a compact direction by constructing a tachyon effective action which takes into account transverse scalars. Such an action is relevant in the study of HQCD model of Sakai and Sugimoto of chiral symmetry breaking, where the size of the compact circle sets the confinement scale. Our approach is motivated by string theory orbifold constructions and gives a route to model inhomogeneous tachyon decay. We illustrate the techniques involved with a relatively simple example of a harmonic oscillator on a circle. We will then repeat the analysis for the Sakai-Sugimoto model and show that by integrating out the winding modes will provide us with a renormalized action with a lower energy than that of truncating to zero winding sector.