Rolling Tachyon

By Ashoke Sen. 2002

1,060 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss construction of classical time dependent solutions in open string (field) theory, describing the motion of the tachyon on unstable D-branes. Despite the fact that the string field theory action contains infinite number of time derivatives, and hence it is not a priori clear how to set up the initial value problem, the theory contains a family of time dependent solutions characterized by the initial position and velocity of the tachyon field. We write down the world-sheet action of the boundary conformal field theories associated with these solutions and study the corresponding boundary states. For D-branes in bosonic string theory, the energy momentum tensor of the system evolves asymptotically towards a finite limit if we push the tachyon in the direction in which the potential has a local minimum, but hits a singularity if we push it in the direction where the potential is unbounded from below.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/191aab37e95b2e91fe8b7b7173d5e75ae0d08893

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Y. Nakayama
2. Andrei Linde
3. L. Rastelli
4. F. Quevedo
5. Ashoke Sen
6. J. Maldacena
7. T. Takayanagi
8. D. Gaiotto

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Ashoke Sen
2. Y. Nakayama
3. J. Maldacena
4. L. Rastelli
5. E. Witten
6. D. Gaiotto
7. N. Seiberg
8. Andrei Linde

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Ashoke Sen
2. Y. Nakayama
3. D. Gaiotto
4. L. Rastelli
5. J. Maldacena
6. N. Seiberg
7. E. Witten
8. B. Zwiebach

Citations in the corpus

• A matrix model dual of type 0B string theory in two dimensions (2003, neutral): “1E-mail: takayana@wigner.harvard.edu 2E-mail: nick@legendre.harvard.edu”
• Dynamics with Infinitely Many Time Derivatives and Rolling Tachyons (2002, methodology): “[9] (section 2), and it uses the analytic continuation of the marginal string field theory solution of ref.”
• D-brane Decay in Two-Dimensional String Theory (2003, background): “In a series of seminal papers Sen proposed a boundary conformal field theory (BCFT) description of the decay of unstable D-branes [1-3].”
• Timelike boundary Liouville theory (2003, background): “The boundary state for this theory was found by analytic continuation from the spacelike case in [14,15], in the context of string theory, where some cases describe an s-brane [16].”