The Stringy Quantum Hall Fluid

Using branes in massive Type IIA string theory, and a novel decoupling limit, we provide an explicit correspondence between non-commutative Chern-Simons theory and the fractional quantum Hall fluid. The role of the electrons is played by D-particles, the background magnetic field corresponds to a RR 2-form flux, and the two-dimensional fluid is described by non-commutative D2-branes. The filling fraction is given by the ratio of the number of D2-branes and the number of D8-branes, and therefore by the ratio rank/level of the Chern-Simons gauge theory. Quasiparticles and quasiholes are realized as endpoints of fundamental strings on the D2-branes, and are found to possess fractional D-particle charges and fractional statistics.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures; references adde

Tachyon Vacuum Solution in Open String Field Theory with Constant B Field

We show that Schnabl's tachyon vacuum solution is an exact solution of the equation of motion of Witten's open bosonic string field theory in the background of constant antisymmetric two-form field. The action computed at the vacuum solution is given by the Dirac-Born-Infeld factor multiplied to that without the antisymmetric tensor field.Comment: 8 page

Tachyon Condensation with B-field

We discuss classical solutions of a graviton-dilaton-B_{\mu\nu}-tachyon system. Both constant tachyon solutions, including AdS_3 solutions, and space-dependent tachyon solutions are investigated, and their possible implications to closed string tachyon condensation are argued. The stability issue of the AdS_3 solutions is also discussed.Comment: 10 pages, references adde

Fluctuations around the Tachyon Vacuum in Open String Field Theory

We consider quadratic fluctuations around the tachyon vacuum numerically in open string field theory. We work on a space ${\cal H}_N^{{\rm vac}}$ spanned by basis string states used in the Schnabl's vacuum solution. We show that the truncated form of the Schnabl's vacuum solution on ${\cal H}_N^{{\rm vac}}$ is well-behaved in numerical work. The orthogonal basis for the new BRST operator $\tilde Q$ on ${\cal H}_N^{{\rm vac}}$ and the quadratic forms of potentials for independent fields around the vacuum are obtained. Our numerical results support that the Schnabl's vacuum solution represents the minimum energy solution for arbitrary fluctuations also in open string field theory.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, some comments and one table added, version to appear in JHE

Compact Lattice QED and the Coulomb Potential

The potential energy of a static charge distribution on a lattice is rigorously computed in the standard compact quantum electrodynamic model. The method used follows closely that of Weyl for ordinary quantum electrodynamics in continuous space-time. The potential energy of the static charge distribution is independent of temperature and can be calculated from the lattice version of Poisson's equation. It is the usual Coulomb potential.Comment: 6 pages, includes one figure in Topdrawer, NUB 3054/9

The energy of the analytic lump solution in SFT

In a previous paper a method was proposed to find exact analytic solutions of open string field theory describing lower dimensional lumps, by incorporating in string field theory an exact renormalization group flow generated by a relevant operator in a worldsheet CFT. In this paper we compute the energy of one such solution, which is expected to represent a D24 brane. We show, both numerically and analytically, that its value corresponds to the theoretically expected one.Comment: 45 pages, former section 2 suppressed, Appendix D added, comments and references added, typos corrected. Erratum adde

The nonperturbative closed string tachyon vacuum to high level

We compute the action of closed bosonic string field theory at quartic order with fields up to level ten. After level four, the value of the potential at the minimum starts oscillating around a nonzero negative value, in contrast with the proposition made in [5]. We try a different truncation scheme in which the value of the potential converges faster with the level. By extrapolating these values, we are able to give a rather precise value for the depth of the potential.Comment: 24 pages. v2: typos corrected, clarified extrapolation in scheme B, and added extrapolated tachyon and dilaton vev's at the end of Section

On fluctuations of closed string tachyon solitons

We discuss fluctuations on solitons in the dilaton/graviton/tachyon system using the low energy effective field theory approach. It is shown that closed string solitons are free of tachyons in this approximation, regardless of the exact shape of the tachyon potential.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, uses JHEP3.cl

Rolling Closed String Tachyons and the Big Crunch

We study the low-energy effective field equations that couple gravity, the dilaton, and the bulk closed string tachyon of bosonic closed string theory. We establish that whenever the tachyon induces the rolling process, the string metric remains fixed while the dilaton rolls to strong coupling. For negative definite potentials we show that this results in an Einstein metric that crunches the universe in finite time. This behavior is shown to be rather generic even if the potentials are not negative definite. The solutions are reminiscent of those in the collapse stage of a cyclic universe cosmology where scalar field potentials with negative energies play a central role.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX. Replaced version: one reference adde