Relativistic D-brane Scattering is Extremely Inelastic

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that relativistic D-brane collisions are highly inelastic due to quantum open string production, significantly altering trajectories and potentially impacting high-speed brane cosmology.

Contribution

It reveals that open string pair production causes strong inelastic effects in relativistic D-brane scattering, a novel stringy correction to classical trajectories.

Findings

Open string production is proportional to the square of the brane rapidity.

Branes rapidly collide and become trapped in symmetric configurations.

Open strings between relativistic branes become surprisingly light.

Abstract

We study the effects of quantum production of open strings on the relativistic scattering of D-branes. We find strong corrections to the brane trajectory from copious production of highly-excited open strings, whose typical oscillator level is proportional to the square of the rapidity. In the corrected trajectory, the branes rapidly coincide and remain trapped in a configuration with enhanced symmetry. This is a purely stringy effect which makes relativistic brane collisions exceptionally inelastic. We trace this effect to velocity-dependent corrections to the open-string mass, which render open strings between relativistic D-branes surprisingly light. We observe that pair-creation of open strings could play an important role in cosmological scenarios in which branes approach each other at very high speeds.