Orientifolds, RG flows, and closed string tachyons

Abstract

hep-th/9907038 LBNL-43634, SLAC-PUB-8187, SU-ITP-99/34 Orientifolds, RG Flows, and Closed String Tachyons arXiv:hep-th/9907038 v3 26 Jul 1999 Shamit Kachru, 1 Jason Kumar, 2 and Eva Silverstein 3 Department of Physics Berkeley, CA 94720 and University of California at Berkeley Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Mail Stop 50A-5101, Berkeley, CA 94720 Department of Physics SLAC Stanford University Stanford, CA 94309 We discuss the fate of certain tachyonic closed string theories from two perspectives. In both cases our approach involves studying directly configurations with finite negative tree- level cosmological constant. Closed string analogues of orientifolds, which carry negative tension, are argued to represent the minima of the tachyon potential in some cases. In other cases, we make use of the fact, noted in the early string theory literature, that strings can propagate on spaces of subcritical dimension at the expense of introducing a tree-level cosmological constant. The form of the tachyon vertex operator in these cases makes it clear that a subcritical-dimension theory results from tachyon condensation. Using results of Kutasov, we argue that in some Scherk-Schwarz models, for finely-tuned tachyon condensates, a minimal model CFT times a subcritical dimension theory results. In some instances, these two sets of ideas may be related by duality. July 1999