HEP/Astro Seminar -- Friday, 08 December 2000

Getting to the bottom of the open string tachyon

Washington Taylor, (MIT)

Abstract

The tachyonic instability of the open bosonic string has presented a puzzle since the early days of string theory. Last year it was suggested by Sen that this puzzle could be resolved by interpreting the condensation of the tachyon in terms of the decay of an unstable D-brane. This talk describes recent work using string field theory to quantitatively study this decay process and to describe the true vacuum of the bosonic string theory.

12:30, Smith Lab 4079