2007/11/16 by Mark Hindmarsh, Huiquan Li · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.77.066005
published as Phys.Rev.D77:066005,2008 · 15 pages, 19 figures
arxiv created 2007/11/16 · openalex publication_date 2008/03/06 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The dynamic process of unstable D-branes decaying into stable ones with one dimension lower can be described by a tachyon field with a Dirac-Born-Infeld effective action. In this paper we investigate the fluctuation modes of the tachyon field around a two-parameter family of static solutions representing an array of brane-antibrane pairs. Besides a pair of zero modes associated with the parameters of the solution, and instabilities associated with annihilation of the brane-antibrane pairs, we find states corresponding to excitations of the tachyon field around the brane and in the bulk. In the limit that the brane thickness tends to zero, the support of the eigenmodes is limited to the brane, consistent with the idea that propagating tachyon modes drop out of the spectrum as the tachyon field approaches its ground state. The zero modes, and other low-lying excited states, show a fourfold degeneracy in this limit, which can be identified with some of the massless superstring modes in the brane-antibrane system. Finally, we also discuss the slow motion of the solution corresponding to the decay process in the moduli space, finding a trajectory which oscillates periodically between the unstable D-brane and the brane-antibrane pairs of one dimension lower.