The tachyon at the end of the universe

By John McGreevy, E. Silverstein. 2005

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that a tachyon condensate phase replaces the spacelike singularity in certain cosmological and black hole spacetimes in string theory. We analyze explicitly a set of examples with flat spatial slices in various dimensions which have a winding tachyon condensate, using worldsheet path integral methods from Liouville theory. In a vacuum with no excitations above the tachyon background in the would-be singular region, we analyze the production of closed strings in the resulting state in the bulk of spacetime. We find a thermal result reminiscent of the Hartle-Hawking state, with tunably small energy density. The amplitudes exhibit a self-consistent truncation of support to the weakly-coupled small-tachyon region of spacetime. We argue that the background is accordingly robust against back reaction, and that the resulting string theory amplitudes are perturbatively finite, indicating a resolution of the singularity and a mechanism to start or end time in string theory. Finally, we discuss the generalization of these methods to examples with positively curved spatial slices.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/461178c24dab3b68c19ab585d90bf0bba5866f16

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. T. Nishioka
2. T. Takayanagi
3. Erik P. Verlinde
4. Ben Craps
5. S. Sethi
6. S. Ryu
7. R. Myers
8. V. Hubeny

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. T. Nishioka
2. T. Takayanagi
3. Erik P. Verlinde
4. Ben Craps
5. S. Sethi
6. V. Hubeny
7. R. Myers
8. S. Raju

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. T. Nishioka
2. T. Takayanagi
3. Erik P. Verlinde
4. Ben Craps
5. S. Sethi
6. R. Myers
7. S. Raju
8. V. Hubeny

Citations in the corpus

• Probe branes, time-dependent couplings and thermalization in AdS/CFT (2010, unknown): “J H E P 0 7 ( 2 0 1 0 ) 0 7 1 theory dual [5–17].”
• AdS bubbles, entropy and closed string tachyons (2006, methodology): “We will also present the dual holographic computation4 [11] in supergravity.”
• A matrix big bang (2005, background): “See, however, the very recent paper [11], which claims that certain space-like singularities are replaced by a tachyon condensate phase within perturbative string theory.”