Confinement and non-perturbative tachyons in brane-antibrane systems: A summary

TL;DR

This paper develops effective actions for brane-antibrane systems to understand confinement and non-perturbative tachyon effects, revealing how fundamental strings emerge and gauge symmetries break at different coupling regimes.

Contribution

It introduces both weak and strong coupling effective actions for (Dp, anti-Dp) systems, illustrating the non-perturbative breaking of U(1) gauge symmetry via a dual Higgs-Stueckelberg mechanism.

Findings

Fundamental strings emerge from brane-antibrane annihilation.

Explicit dual action demonstrates non-perturbative U(1) breaking.

Results align with string theory duality symmetries.

Abstract

We present a worldvolume effective action suitable for the study of the confined phase of a (Dp,anti-Dp) system at weak coupling, and we identify the mechanism by which the fundamental string arises from this action when the Dp and the anti-Dp annihilate. We construct an explicit dual action, appropriate for the strong coupling regime, which realizes a generalized Higgs-Stueckelberg phase for the (relative) (p-2)-form dual to the (overall) BI vector, the mechanism put forward by Yi and collaborators for realizing non-perturbatively the breaking of the overall U(1) gauge group. Our results provide an explicit realization of the perturbative breaking of the overall U(1) in a way that is consistent with the duality symmetries of String Theory.