Lumps and P-branes in Open String Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper develops numerical methods to construct and evaluate lump solutions in open string field theory, confirming their interpretation as Dp-branes and supporting Sen's conjecture with high accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces detailed numerical techniques for lump solutions in open string field theory, emphasizing the role of higher derivative terms and validating the D-brane interpretation.

Findings

Numerical energy evaluations match Sen's conjectured tension values.

Higher derivative terms are crucial for accurate off-shell calculations.

The methods confirm the interpretation of lumps as Dp-branes.

Abstract

We describe numerical methods for constructing lump solutions in open string field theory. According to Sen, these lumps represent lower dimensional Dp-Branes and numerical evaluation of their energy can be compared with the expected value for the tension. We take particular care of all higher derivative terms inherent in Witten's version of open string field theory. The importance of these terms for off shell phenomena is argued in the text. Detailed numerical calculations done for the case of general $p$ brane show very good agreement with Sen's conjectured value. This gives credence to the conjecture itself and establishes further the usefulness of Witten's version of SFT .