Don't Panic! Closed String Tachyons in ALE Spacetimes

By A. Adams, J. Polchinski, E. Silverstein. 2001

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider closed string tachyons localized at the fixed points of noncompact nonsupersymmetric orbifolds. We argue that tachyon condensation drives these orbifolds to flat space or supersymmetric ALE spaces. The decay proceeds via an expanding shell of dilaton gradients and curvature which interpolates between two regions of distinct angular geometry. The string coupling remains weak throughout. For small tachyon VEVs, evidence comes from quiver theories on D-branes probes, in which deformations by twisted couplings smoothly connect non-supersymmetric orbifolds to supersymmetric orbifolds of reduced order. For large tachyon VEVs, evidence comes from worldsheet RG flow and spacetime gravity. For 2/n, we exhibit infinite sequences of transitions producing SUSY ALE spaces via twisted closed string condensation from non-supersymmetric ALE spaces. In a T-dual description this provides a mechanism for creating NS5-branes via closed string tachyon condensation similar to the creation of D-branes via open string tachyon condensation. We also apply our results to recent duality conjectures involving fluxbranes and the type 0 string.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b38de6527a4dbbc182979ed2eb202b225224297

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

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Standard Model at Intersecting D5-branes: Lowering the String Scale (2002, background): “ (actually, due to the ΩR modding, only 1 2 (N − 1) real such tachyons do actually appear). The physical interpretation of analogous type of closed string tachyons have been recently discussed in ref.[34] for the case of non-compact orbifolds. A similar discussion in the case of compact orbifolds an”
Instability of spacelike and null orbifold singularities (2002, background): “warzschild radius RD −3 s ∼ G(p+p )1/2enα/2 (9) 1To avoid this, one might consider just the past and future wedges. Since this is not a true orbifold (it is a quasiorbifold in the terminology of ref. [18]) there are no methods as yet for studying such a space in string theory, or even for showing th”
Introduction to Gauge/Gravity Duality (2010, background): “If a nonsupersymmetric element of Γ has a fixed point there will be a localized tachyon, with the result that a hole develops and consumes the space [47].”
The tachyon at the end of the universe (2005, background): “hods to examples with positively curved spatial slices. June 2005 1. Introduction Closed string tachyon condensation aﬀects the dynamics of spacetime in interesting and tractable ways in many systems [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. In this paper, we study circumstances in which closed string tachyon condensation p”
On the classification of 6D SCFTs and generalized ADE orbifolds (2013, background): “For work in this direction, see for example [22–27].”
Microscopic formulation of black holes in string theory (2002, methodology): “arzschild black hole is in fact replaced by a cone for computing the entropy. The corresponding orbifold string theory has a closed string tachyon whose dynamics is dealt with using the techniques of [223]. It is obvious interest to understand this calculation in terms of miscrostates. 5. One of the”
Tachyon effective actins in open string theory (2003, background): “ckreaction of the metric and dilaton to the stress-tensor of the tachyon. Another natural arena in which eﬀective actions such as (1.1) might be useful is localized closed string tachyon condensation [39, 40, 41, 42, 43], where the backreaction is milder, and in particular the central charge does no”
Clean Time-Dependent String Backgrounds from Bubble Baths (2002, background): “ntinuations of more general black holes, such as asymptotically AdS or dS black holes. Recently, a number of other interesting time-dependent backgrounds have been introduced and studied, for example [14,15,4,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24]. The backgrounds we study here are complimentary to these in ma”
Fractional quantum Hall effect via holography: Chern-Simons, edge states and hierarchy (2009, methodology): “e type IIA GSO projection requires pto be an odd integer, otherwise the theory becomes type 0 string and suﬀers from a bulk tachyon. Though in general we cannot avoid localized closed string tachyons [48, 49], we ignore this issue in this paper. The minimal resolution of the orbifold singularity C2/”
Exact standard model structures from intersecting D5-branes (2002, background): “Similar issues have been examined in the context of non-compact orbifolds [44].”
AdS bubbles, entropy and closed string tachyons (2006, result): “yoto-u.ac.jp 1. Introduction The understandings of closed string tachyon condensation have been far from complete in spite of many eﬀorts e.g. the pioneering work by Adams, Polchinski and Silverstein [1] (a list of references can be found in reviews [2][3]). One of the most important problems is to ”