The Spectrum of Open String Field Theory at the Stable Tachyonic Vacuum

TL;DR

This paper numerically analyzes the open string field theory spectrum at the stable tachyonic vacuum, providing evidence for gauge-triviality and absence of the photon, and revealing ghost propagator features.

Contribution

It offers a detailed numerical spectrum analysis at level (10,30), confirming theoretical predictions and uncovering ghost cohomology structures in open string field theory.

Findings

No photon in the spectrum, supporting gauge-triviality

Ghost propagators have double poles

Non-empty BRST cohomologies at non-standard ghost numbers

Abstract

We present a level (10,30) numerical computation of the spectrum of quadratic fluctuations of Open String Field Theory around the tachyonic vacuum, both in the scalar and in the vector sector. Our results are consistent with Sen's conjecture about gauge-triviality of the small excitations. The computation is sufficiently accurate to provide robust evidence for the absence of the photon from the open string spectrum. We also observe that ghost string field propagators develop double poles. We show that this requires non-empty BRST cohomologies at non-standard ghost numbers. We comment about the relations of our results with recent work on the same subject.