We consider an unstable bound system of two supersymmetric Dirichlet branes of different dimensionality ($p,p'$ with $p'<p$) embedded in a flat non-compactified IIA or IIB type background. We study the decay, via tachyonic condensation, of such unstable bound states leading to a pair of bound D$(p-1)$, D$p'$-branes. We show that only when the gauge fields carried by the D$p$-brane are localised perependicular to the tachyon direction, then tachyon condensation will indeed take place. We perform our analysis by combining both, the Hamiltonian and the Lagrangian approach.
We study the instability of a scalar field at the end of hybrid inflation, using both analytical techniques and numerical simulations. We improve previous studies by taking the inflaton field fully into account, and show that the range of unstable modes depends sensitively on the velocity of the inflaton field, and thereby on the Hubble rate, at the end of inflation. If topological defects are formed, their number density is determined by the shortest unstable wavelength. Finally, we show that the oscillations of the inflaton field amplify the inhomogeneities in the energy density, leading to …
We compute the Kaluza-Klein spectrum of the non-supersymmetric SO(3)$\,\times\,$SO(3)-invariant AdS$_4$ vacuum of 11-dimensional supergravity, whose lowest-lying Kaluza-Klein modes belong to a consistent truncation to 4-dimensional ${\cal N}=8$ supergravity and are stable. We show that, nonetheless, the higher Kaluza-Klein modes become tachyonic so that this non-supersymmetric AdS$_4$ vacuum is perturbatively unstable within 11-dimensional supergravity. This represents the first example of unstable higher Kaluza-Klein modes and provides further evidence for the AdS swampland conjecture, which …
We consider tachyon effective theory with Born-Infeld electromagnetic fields and investigate the configurational entropy of the various tachyon kink solutions. We find that the configurational entropy stats at a minimum value and saturates to a maximum value as the negative pressure of pure tachyonic field increases. In particular, when an electric field is turned on and its magnitude is larger than or equal to the critical value, we find the configurational entropy has a global minimum, which is related to the predominant tachyonic states.
We consider tachyon condensation in unstable ten-dimensional heterotic string theory with gauge group E8. In the background of a lightlike linear dilaton rolling to weak coupling, we find an exact solution in which the theory decays to a stable ground state. The final state represents a new, modular-invariant perturbative string theory, tachyon-free in nine spacetime dimensions with a spacelike dilaton gradient, E8 gauge group and no spacetime supersymmetry.
Lattice Monte Carlo studies in SU(3) gauge theory have shown that the topological charge distribution in the vacuum is dominated by thin coherent membranes of codimension one arranged in a layered, alternating-sign sandwich. A similar lamination of topological charge occurs in the 2D $CP^{N-1}$ model. In holographic QCD, the observed topological charge sheets are naturally interpreted as $D6$ branes wrapped around an $S_4$.. With this interpretation, the laminated array of topological charge membranes observed on the lattice can be identified as a "tachyonic crystal", a regular, alternating-si…
A system of k Neveu-Schwarz (NS) 5-branes of type II string theory with one transverse direction compactified on a circle admits various unstable D-brane systems, - some with geometric instability arising out of being placed at a point of unstable equilibrium in space and some with the usual open string tachyonic instability but no geometric instability. We discuss the effect of NS 5-branes on the descent relations among these branes and their physical interpretation in the T-dual ALF spaces. We argue that if the tachyon potential controlling these descent relations obeys certain conditions, t…
Cosmological models of the early or late universe exhibit (quasi) de Sitter space-times with different stability properties. Considering models derived from string theory, the swampland program does not provide for now a definite characterisation of this stability. In this work we focus on de Sitter solutions of 10d type II supergravities, candidates for classical de Sitter string backgrounds: surprisingly, all known examples are unstable with $η_V < -1$. We aim at proving the existence of such a systematic tachyon, and getting formally a bound on the value of $η_V$. To that end, we develop th…
We introduce a boundary state which is corresponding to a D$p$-brane with tangential dynamics in the presence of the Kalb-Ramond field, a tachyonic field and a $U(1)$ gauge potential in a special gauge. From the interaction of such branes radiation amplitude of a general massless closed string will be computed. The effects of the large distances of the branes on this radiation will be studied. In the large distances of the branes, the possibility of axion radiation will be investigated. Our calculations will be in the context of the bosonic string theory.
We analyze the stability of four-dimensional de Sitter vacua constructed by compactifying massive Type IIA supergravity in the presence of two O8 sources [1]. When embedded in String Theory the first source has a clear interpretation as an O8$_-$ plane, but the second one could correspond to either an O8$_+$ plane or to an O8$_-$ plane with 16 D8-branes on top. We find that this latter solution has a tachyonic instability, corresponding to the D8-branes moving away from the O8$_-$ plane. We comment on the possible ways of distinguishing between these sources.
We study Born-Infeld type tachyonic effective action of unstable D2-brane with a runaway potential and find rich structure of static regular solitonic solutions. There exists only periodic array of tachyon kink-antikinks in pure tachyonic theory, however, in the presence of electromagnetic fields, solutions include periodic arrays, topological tachyon kinks, half kink, and bounces. Computed tension of each kink or single unit of the periodic array has $T_{1}=\sqrt{2}πT_{2}$ or that with a multiplicative factor depending on electric field. When both electric and magnetic fields are turned on, f…
We study soliton solutions in scalar field theory with a variety of unbounded potentials. A subset of these potentials have Gaussian lump solutions and their fluctuation spectrum is governed by the harmonic oscillator problem. These lumps are unstable with one tachyonic mode. Soliton solutions in several other classes of potentials are stable and are of kink type. The problem of the stability of these solutions is related to a supersymmetric quantum mechanics problem. The fluctuation spectrum is not equispaced and does not contain any tachyonic mode. The lowest energy mode is the massless Gold…
An unstable $D3$-brane universe governed by the DBI action of the tachyon field minimally coupled to a U(1) gauge boson is examined. The cosmological evolution of this coupled system, is further analyzed, in terms of the expansion rate of the inflating brane, which is highly affected by the presence of the tachyonic and gauge field charges. We show, that the minimal coupling makes the effective brane density less divergent. However, for some sectors of the theory the tachyon is not able to regulate it in an efficient fashion. Also, a detailed analysis of the dependance of the effective brane d…
By using the non-supersymmetric $p$-brane solutions delocalized in arbitrary number of transverse directions in type II supergravities, we show how they can be regarded as interpolating solutions between unstable D$p$-branes (a non-BPS D-brane or a pair of coincident D-brane-antiD-brane) and fundamental strings and also between unstable D$p$-branes and NS5-branes. We also show that some of these solutions can be regarded as interpolating solutions between NS5/$\bar{\rm NS}$5 and D$p$-branes (for $p \leq 5$). This gives a closed string description of the tachyon condensation and lends support t…
We study gauge theories on the world-volume of D3-branes probing singularities. Seiberg duality can be realized as a sequence of Picard-Lefschetz monodromies on 3-cycles in the mirror manifold. In previous work, the precise meaning of gauge theories obtained by monodromies that do not correspond to Seiberg duality was unclear. Recently, it was pointed out that these theories contain tachyons, suggesting that the collection of marginally bound branes at the singularity is unstable. We address this problem using (p,q) web techniques. It is shown that theories with tachyons appear whenever the (p…
We report our searches for a single tubular tachyonic solution of regular profile on unstable non BPS D3-branes. We first show that some extended Dirac-Born-Infeld tachyon actions in which new contributions are added to avoid the Derrick's no-go theorem still could not have a single regular tube solution. Next we use the Minahan-Zwiebach tachyon action to find the regular tube solutions with circular or elliptic cross section. With a critical electric field, the energy of the tube comes entirely from the D0 and strings, while the energy associated to the tubular D2-brane tension is vanishing. …
We propose an ansatz for the equations of motion of the noncommutative model of a tachyonic scalar field interacting with a gauge field, which allows one to find time-dependent solutions describing decaying solitons. These correspond to the collapse of lower dimensional branes obtained through tachyon condensation of unstable brane systems in string theory.
In this paper we continue studying the decay of unstable FZZT branes initiated in [1],[2]. The mass of tachyonic mode in this model can be chosen arbitrarily small and we use it as a perturbative parameter. In [2] a time-dependent boundary conformal field theory (BCFT) describing the decay process was studied and it was shown that in a certain sense this BCFT interpolates between two stationary BCFT's corresponding to the UV and IR fixed points of the associated RG flow. In the present work we find in the leading order vertex operators of the time-dependent BCFT. We identify the "in" and "out"…
When unstable Dp-branes in type II string theory are placed in a B-field, the resulting tachyonic world-volume theory becomes noncommutative. We argue that for large noncommutativity parameter, condensation of the tachyon as a noncommutative soliton leads to new decay modes of the Dp-brane into (p-2)-brane configurations, which we interpret as suitably smeared BPS D(p-1)-branes. Some of these configurations are metastable. We discuss various generalizations of this decay process.
We study real time dynamics of a Dp-brane orbiting a stack of NS5-branes. It is generally known that a BPS D-brane moving in the vicinity of NS5-branes becomes unstable due to the presence of tachyonic degree of freedom induced on the D-brane. Indeed, the D-brane necessarily falls into the fivebranes due to gravitational attraction and eventually collapses into a pressureless fluid. Such a decay of the D-brane is known to be closely related to the rolling tachyon problem. In this paper we show that in special cases the decay of D-brane caused by gravitational attraction can be avoided. Namely …
We calculate the potential for $Dp-\Dbar p$ pair and show that the coincident $Dp-\Dbar p$ system has $(11-p)$ tachyonic modes, with $(9-p)$ of them due to radiative corrections. We propose that the decay width of an unstable non-BPS-$Dp$-brane to closed strings is given by the imaginary part of the one-loop contribution to the effective potential of the open string tachyon mode.
We investigate the possible appearance of composite states of the goldstino in models with four-dimensional non-linear supersymmetry and we provide a description of their dynamics in terms of a Kähler potential and a superpotential. Our analysis shows that the critical point corresponding to the Volkov-Akulov model is unstable. Similarly, we find that the uplifted stable de Sitter critical point of the KKLT model is shifted and acquires a tachyonic instability. Our findings indicate the existence of a potentially dangerous instability shared by all anti-brane uplifts.
We consider the perturbation of tachyon about the extremal ground state of a two-dimensional (2D) electrically charged black hole. It is found that the presenting potential to on-coming tachyonic wave takes a double-humped barrier well. This allows an exponentially growing mode with respect to time. This extremal ground state is classically unstable. We conclude that the 2D extremal electrically charged black hole cannot be a candidate for the stable endpoint of the Hawking evaporation.
We discuss how the BPS branes of M-theory could be described as bound states of non-BPS M10-branes. This conjectured M10-brane is constructed as an unstable spacetime-filling brane in the massive eleven dimensional supergravity defined with a Killing direction, such that 1) the BPS M9-brane is obtained after the tachyonic mode of an M2-brane ending on it condenses, and 2) it gives the non-BPS D9-brane of the type IIA theory upon reduction. The existence of other non-BPS M-branes is also discussed, together with their possible stabilisation within the Horava-Witten construction.
We study the dynamics of localized and fully backreacting anti-D3 branes at the tip of the Klebanov-Strassler geometry. We use a non-supersymmetric version of the Polchinski-Strassler analysis to compute the potential for anti-D3 branes to polarize into all kinds of five-brane shells in all possible directions. We find that generically there is a direction along which the brane-brane interaction is repulsive, which implies that anti-D3 branes are tachyonic. Hence, even though anti-D3 branes can polarize into five-branes, the solution will most likely be unstable. This indicates that anti-D3 br…
We quantize the deformed modes of a single supertube solution with regular profile of circular cross section on the unstable non-BPS D3-branes by using the Minahan-Zwiebach tachyon action. The result is used to count the microstates in an ensemble of supertube with fixed macroscopic quantities of charges $Q_{D0}$, $Q_{F1}$ and angular momentum $J$. We show that the entropy of the system is proportional to $\sqrt{Q_{D0}Q_{F1} - J}$, which is consistent with that calculated by the DBI action. Therefore, besides the well known properties that the kink solution (and its fluctuation) of tachyon DBI…
I consider the chromomagnetic vacuum in SU(2). The effective Lagrangian in one loop approximation is known to have a minimum below zero which results in a spontaneously generated magnetic field. However, this minimum is not stable; the effective action has an imaginary part. Over the past decades, there were many attempts to handle this situation which all were at some point unsatisfactory. I propose an idea for a new solution by assuming that the tachyonic mode, at low temperature, acquires a condensate and, as a result, undergoes a phase transition like in the Higgs model. I consider the app…
We consider a codimension two scalar theory with brane-localised Higgs type potential. The six-dimensional field has Dirichlet boundary condition on the bounds of the transverse compact space. The regularisation of the brane singularity yields renormalisation group evolution for the localised couplings at the classical level. In particular, a tachyonic mass term grows at large distances and hits a Landau pole. We exhibit a peculiar value of the bare coupling such that the running mass parameter becomes large precisely at the compactification scale, and the effective four-dimensional zero mode …
The Kaluza-Klein linear dilaton background of the bosonic string and the Scherk-Schwarz linear dilaton background of the superstring are shown to be unstable to the decay of half of spacetime. The decay proceeds via a condensation of a semi-localized tachyon when the circle is smaller than a critical size, and via a semiclassical instanton process when the circle is larger than the critical size. At criticality the two pictures are related by a duality of the corresponding two-dimensional conformal field theories. This provides a concrete realization of the connection between tachyonic and sem…
We study aspects of Dirichlet S-branes, which are defined as Dirichlet boundary condition on a time like embedding of open strings, in general backgrounds. By applying T-duality along an isometry of the unphysical dS2-branes in NS-NS supported AdS3-background, we find S0-brane. We also study the time dependent tachyon condensation on the unstable Dp-brane and interpret the singular solutions as lower dimensional S(p-1)-brane that couples to real Ramond-Ramond fields while to imaginary NS-NS modes.
The method of probe brane is the powerful one to obtain the effective action living on the probe brane from supergravity. We apply this method to the unstable brane systems, and understand the tachyon condensation in the context of the open/closed duality. First, we probe the parallel coincident branes by the anti-brane. In this case, the mass squared of the stretched string becomes negative infinite in the decoupling limit. So that the dual open string field theory is difficult to understand. Next, we probe parallel coincident branes by a brane intersecting with an angle. In this case, the st…
D0-branes on a D2-brane with a constant background B-field are unstable due to the presence of a tachyonic mode and expected to dissolve into the D2-brane to formulate a constant D0-charge density. In this paper we study such a dissolution process in terms of a noncommutative gauge theory. Our results show that the localized D0-brane spreads out over all of space on the D2-brane as the tachyon rolls down into a stable vacuum. D0-branes on a D2-brane can be described as unstable solitons in a noncommutative gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions in the Seiberg-Witten limit. In contrast to the case of a…
Certain configurations of D-branes, for example wrong dimensional branes or the brane-antibrane system, are unstable to decay. This instability is described by the appearance of a tachyonic mode in the spectrum of open strings ending on the brane(s). The decay of these unstable systems is described by the rolling of the tachyon field from the unstable maximum to the minimum of its potential. We analytically study the dynamics of the inhomogeneous tachyon field as it rolls towards the true vacuum of the theory in the context of several different tachyon effective actions. We find that the vacuu…
We study the fuzzy or noncommutative Dp-branes in terms of infinitely many unstable D0-branes, from which we can construct any Dp-branes. We show that the tachyon condensation of the unstable D0-branes induces the noncommutativity. In the infinite tachyon condensation limit, most of the unstable D0-branes disappear and remaining D0-branes are actually the BPS D0-branes with the correct noncommutative coordinates. For the fuzzy S^2 case, we explicitly show only the D0-branes corresponding to the lowest Landau level survive in the limit. We also show that a boundary state for a Dp-brane satisfyi…
S(pacelike)D-branes are objects arising naturally in string theory when Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed on the time direction. SD-brane physics is inherently time-dependent. Previous investigations of gravity fields of SD-branes have yielded undesirable naked spacelike singularities. We set up the problem of coupling the most relevant open-string tachyonic mode to massless closed-string modes in the bulk, with backreaction and Ramond-Ramond fields included. We find solutions numerically in a self-consistent approximation; our solutions are naturally asymptotically flat and time-rever…
We consider two classes of backgrounds of Type IIB supergravity obtained by wrapping D5-branes on a two-cycle inside the conifold. The field theory dual exhibits confinement and, in addition, a region in which the dynamics is walking, at least in the weak sense that the running of the coupling is anomalously slow. We introduce quenched matter in the fundamental, modelled by probe D7-branes which wrap an internal three-dimensional manifold and lie at the equator of the transverse two-sphere. In the space spanned by the remaining internal angle and the radial coordinate the branes admit two embe…
We present a tachyon field, which simply connects to the calculus of the tachyon condensation. The tachyon field acts on any bare boundary state: the Neumann or the Dirichlet state, and generates the boundary state suggested by S.P. de Alwis, which leads to the correct ratio between D-brane tensions. On the other hand we generalize the Hirota-Miwa equation to the case where there are two boundaries. We show that correlation functions made from only the integrand of the tachyon field satisfy the generalized Hirota-Miwa equation. Using the formulation based on this evidence, we suggest that the …
Open string field theory is considered as a tool for deriving the effective action for the massless or tachyonic fields living on D-branes. Some simple calculations are performed in open bosonic string field theory which validate this approach. The level truncation method is used to calculate successive approximations to the quartic terms ϕ^4, (A^μA_μ)^2 and [A_μ, A_ν]^2 for the zero momentum tachyon and gauge field on one or many bosonic D-branes. We find that the level truncation method converges for these terms within 2-4% when all massive fields up to level 20 are integrated out, although …
The inflationary models developed in presence of a background radiation can be a solution to the reheating problem faced by common cold (isentropic) inflationary scenario. A D-brane system comprising of k Neuvo-Schwarz(NS) 5-branes with a transverse circle and BPS D3-branes with world volume parallel to the NS 5-branes, placed at a point on the transverse circle diametrically opposite to the NS 5-branes has a point of unstable equilibrium and the D3 brane has a geometric tachyonic mode associated with displacement of the brane along the circle. Cold inflationary scenario has been studied in co…
