• DOI:10.1088/1126-6708/2002/04/048
• Corpus ID: 12023565

Rolling Tachyon

@inproceedings{Sen2002RollingT,
  title={Rolling Tachyon},
  author={Ashoke Sen},
  year={2002}
}

• Ashoke Sen
• Published 22 March 2002
• Physics

We discuss construction of classical time dependent solutions in open string (field) theory, describing the motion of the tachyon on unstable D-branes. Despite the fact that the string field theory action contains infinite number of time derivatives, and hence it is not a priori clear how to set up the initial value problem, the theory contains a family of time dependent solutions characterized by the initial position and velocity of the tachyon field. We write down the world-sheet action of the boundary conformal field theories associated with these solutions and study the corresponding boundary states. For D-branes in bosonic string theory, the energy momentum tensor of the system evolves asymptotically towards a finite limit if we push the tachyon in the direction in which the potential has a local minimum, but hits a singularity if we push it in the direction where the potential is unbounded from below.