Related papers: Tachyons and Misaligned Supersymmetry in Closed St…
The study of non-supersymmetric string theories is shedding light on an important corner of the string landscape and might ultimately explain why, so far, we did not observe supersymmetry in our universe. We review how misaligned…
In this note we reexamine the possibility of constructing stable non-supersymmetric theories that exhibit an exponential density of states. For weakly coupled closed strings there is a general theorem, according to which stable theories…
We extend the analysis of Misaligned Supersymmetry to orientifold vacua. The lack of modular invariance in the Klein bottle, annulus and M\"obius strip amplitudes implies that the IR properties of the physical spectrum are related to the UV…
We consider twisted tachyons on C/Z_N orbifolds of bosonic closed string theory. It has been conjectured that these tachyonic instabilities correspond to decays of the orbifolds into flat space or into orbifolds with smaller deficit angles.…
We provide a non-technical introduction to "misaligned supersymmetry", a generic phenomenon in string theory which describes how the arrangement of bosonic and fermionic states at all string energy levels conspires to preserve finite string…
It is shown that classical decay of unstable D-branes in bosonic and superstring theories produces pressureless gas with non-zero energy density. The energy density is stored in the open string fields, even though around the minimum of the…
We investigate the generic distribution of bosonic and fermionic states at all mass levels in non-supersymmetric string theories, and find that a hidden ``misaligned supersymmetry'' must always appear in the string spectrum. We show that…
We find that tachyonic orbifold examples of AdS/CFT have corresponding instabilities at small radius, and can decay to more generic gauge theories. We do this by computing a destabilizing Coleman-Weinberg effective potential for twisted…
In bosonic closed string field theory the "tachyon potential" is a potential for the tachyon, the dilaton, and an infinite set of massive fields. Earlier computations of the potential did not include the dilaton and the critical point…
We use open string field theory to study the dynamics of unstable branes in the bosonic string theory, in the background of a generic linear dilaton. We find a simple exact solution describing a dynamical interpolation between the…
Certain configurations of D-branes, for example wrong dimensional branes or the brane-antibrane system, are unstable to decay. This instability is described by the appearance of a tachyonic mode in the spectrum of open strings ending on the…
Assuming that around the tachyon vacuum the kinetic term of cubic open string field theory is made purely of ghost operators we are led to gauge invariant actions which manifestly implement the absence of open string dynamics around this…
The tachyonic instability of the open bosonic string is analyzed using the level truncation approach to string field theory. We have calculated all terms in the cubic action of the string field theory describing zero-momentum interactions…
We consider 'orbifold' and 'orientifold' field theories from the dual closed string theory side. We argue that a necessary condition for planar equivalence to hold is the absence of a closed string tachyonic mode in the dual…
String theory relies on spacetime supersymmetry to guarantee the existence of stable vacua. In this review, we survey two features of non-supersymmetric strings that challenge both aspects: the appearance of tachyons and worldsheet…
We consider bosonic open string field theory in marginally deformed backgrounds, which is obtained by expanding the string field around the identity-based solutions associated with marginal deformations. We find a new set of string fields…
We conjecture that the end point of bulk closed string tachyon decay at any non-zero coupling, is the annihilation of space time by Witten's bubble of nothing, resulting in a topological phase of the theory. In support of this we present a…
It has recently been argued that D-branes in bosonic string theory can be described as noncommutative solitons, outside whose core the tachyon is condensed to its ground state. We conjecture that, in addition, the local U(1) gauge symmetry…
In this review we describe our current understanding of the properties of open string tachyons on an unstable D-brane or brane-antibrane system in string theory. The various string theoretic methods used for this study include techniques of…
A recently proposed \ell=\infty field theory model of tachyon dynamics for unstable bosonic D-branes has been shown to arise as the two-derivative truncation of (boundary)-string field theory. Using an \ell\to \infty limit appropriate to…