D-Branes, Tachyons, and String Field Theory

By Washington Taylor, B. Zwiebach. 2003

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In these notes we provide a pedagogical introduction to the subject of tachyon condensation in Witten's cubic bosonic open string field theory. We use both the low-energy Yang-Mills description and the language of string field theory to explain the problem of tachyon condensation on unstable D-branes. We give a self-contained introduction to open string field theory using both conformal field theory and overlap integrals. Our main subjects are the Sen conjectures on tachyon condensation in open string field theory and the evidence that supports these conjectures. We conclude with a discussion of vacuum string field theory and projectors of the star-algebra of open string fields. We comment on the possible role of string field theory in the construction of a nonperturbative formulation of string theory that captures all possible string backgrounds.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffe712169cb3efdefbca124cf610cbf4761b5d5c

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Citations in the corpus

Proof of vanishing cohomology at the tachyon vacuum (2006, background): “In spite of the approximate nature of the analysis, it has been found that OSFT has a rich structure.”
Analytic solution for tachyon condensation in open string field theory (2005, methodology): “Despite the beauty and simplicity of Witten’s covariant field theory [1] for open bosonic string, only limited progress has been achieved over the years in practical applications [ 2 , 3]. The two main successes of the theory are computations of certain perturbative string amplitudes and understandi”
Comments on Schnabl's analytic solution for tachyon condensation in Witten's open string field theory (2006, methodology): “Schnabl adopted the definition used in a series of papers by Rastelli, Sen and Zwiebach such as [15] or in a review [31].”
A simple analytic solution for tachyon condensation (2009, background): “9) (23)A is related to the twist conjugation introduced in [17, 58] by a minus sign.”
Analytic solutions for marginal deformations in open string field theory (2007, background): “classical open string field theory (OSFT) gives an accurate description of the open string landscape. See [1, 2 , 3] for reviews.”
Les Houches lectures on matrix models and topological strings (2004, background): “The star product simply glues the strings together by folding them around their midpoints, and gluing the first half of one with the second half of the following (see for example the review [65] for more details), and it doesn’t change the ghost number.”