Toy Model for Tachyon Condensation in Bosonic String Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates tachyon condensation in a simplified bosonic string field theory model, providing exact solutions for the stable vacuum and potential, and compares these with numerical methods used in full string theory.

Contribution

It introduces a toy model for tachyon condensation, deriving closed form solutions for the stable vacuum and potential, and analyzes the convergence of numerical methods.

Findings

Exact expressions for the stable vacuum and potential at the minimum.

Comparison of convergence rates between exact results and numerical methods.

Validation of the toy model as a useful approximation for full string field theory.

Abstract

We study tachyon condensation in a baby version of Witten's open string field theory. For some special values of one of the parameters of the model, we are able to obtain closed form expressions for the stable vacuum state and for the value of the potential at the minimum. We study the convergence rate of the level truncation method and compare our exact results with the numerical results found in the full string field theory.