Null Brane Intersections

TL;DR

This paper investigates null hypersurface intersecting D-branes, revealing their spectrum, stability conditions, and implications for string theory backgrounds and null cosmological singularities, highlighting a novel stringy condensation mechanism.

Contribution

It introduces the study of null hypersurface intersecting D-branes, analyzing their spectrum, stability, and effects on string backgrounds and singularities, including a new understanding of BPS bound states.

Findings

Open strings between shifted D-branes have no asymptotic states.

Single non-BPS excitations can induce condensation of massless modes.

The analysis provides insights into null cosmological singularities and BPS bound states.

Abstract

We study pairs of planar D-branes intersecting on null hypersurfaces, and other related configurations. These are supersymmetric and have finite energy density. They provide open-string analogues of the parabolic orbifold and null-fluxbrane backgrounds for closed superstrings. We derive the spectrum of open strings, showing in particular that if the D-branes are shifted in a spectator dimension so that they do not intersect, the open strings joining them have no asymptotic states. As a result, a single non-BPS excitation can in this case catalyze a condensation of massless modes, changing significantly the underlying supersymmetric vacuum state. We argue that a similar phenomenon can modify the null cosmological singularity of the time-dependent orbifolds. This is a stringy mechanism, distinct from black-hole formation and other strong gravitational instabilities, and one that should dominate at weak string coupling. A by-product of our analysis is a new understanding of the appearance of 1/4 BPS threshold bound states, at special points in the moduli space of toroidally-compactified type-II string theory.