Level truncation and the tachyon in open bosonic string field theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the tachyon instability in open bosonic string field theory using level truncation up to level 20, revealing rapid convergence towards the stable vacuum and insights into the potential's structure.

Contribution

It provides detailed calculations of the cubic action and effective potential, demonstrating convergence properties and the existence of a critical point in the tachyon potential.

Findings

99.91% of the D-brane tension energy is canceled in the stable vacuum

The energy gap converges faster than the potential coefficients

Evidence of a critical point with a finite radius of convergence

Abstract

The tachyonic instability of the open bosonic string is analyzed using the level truncation approach to string field theory. We have calculated all terms in the cubic action of the string field theory describing zero-momentum interactions of up to level 20 between scalars of level 10 or less. These results are used to study the tachyon effective potential and the nonperturbative stable vacuum. We find that the energy gap between the unstable and stable vacua converges much more quickly than the coefficients of the effective tachyon potential. By including fields up to level 10, 99.91% of the energy from the bosonic D-brane tension is cancelled in the nonperturbative stable vacuum. It appears that the perturbative expansion of the effective tachyon potential around the unstable vacuum has a small but finite radius of convergence. We find evidence for a critical point in the tachyon effective potential at a small negative value of the tachyon field corresponding to this radius of convergence. We study the branch structure of the effective potential in the vicinity of this point and speculate that the tachyon effective potential is globally nonnegative.