Stochastic Tachyon Fluctuations, Marginal Deformations and Shock Waves in String Theory

TL;DR

This paper constructs gravitational shock wave solutions in string theory by introducing stochastic tachyon fluctuations, demonstrating their marginality at the conformal field theory level and accounting for all -corrections in specific 4D backgrounds.

Contribution

It presents a method to generate shock wave solutions in string theory via stochastic tachyon fluctuations, ensuring conformal invariance and including all -corrections for certain backgrounds.

Findings

Shock wave solutions are derived from exact string backgrounds.

Tachyon fluctuations induce marginal deformations in the CFT.

All -corrections are incorporated in the analysis.

Abstract

Starting with exact solutions to string theory on curved spacetimes we obtain deformations that represent gravitational shock waves. These may exist in the presence or absence of sources. Sources are effectively induced by a tachyon field that randomly fluctuates around a zero condensate value. It is shown that at the level of the underlying conformal field theory (CFT) these deformations are marginal and moreover all \a'-corrections are taken into account. Explicit results are given when the original undeformed 4-dimensional backgrounds correspond to tensor products of combinations of 2-dimensional CFT's, for instance SL(2,R)/R \times SU(2)/U(1).