Universality of the Tachyon Potential

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the tachyon potential in various string theory setups has a universal form, implying background independence of the potential's minimum energy, which has implications for brane stability and decay.

Contribution

It establishes the universality of the tachyon potential across different backgrounds and brane types using string field theory, revealing background-independent properties.

Findings

Tachyon potential has a universal form in string theory.

Minimum energy of brane-antibrane systems is background-independent.

Results apply to non-BPS D-branes and bosonic string D-branes.

Abstract

Using string field theory, we argue that the tachyon potential on a D-brane anti-D-brane system in type II string theory in arbitrary background has a universal form, independent of the boundary conformal field theory describing the brane. This implies that if at the minimum of the tachyon potential the total energy of the brane antibrane system vanishes in a particular background, then it vanishes in any other background. Similar result holds for the tachyon potential of the non-BPS D-branes of type II string theory, and the D-branes of bosonic string theory.