Proper acceleration, the geometric tachyon and the dynamics of a fundamental string near Dp branes

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of our recent observation that the origin of the geometric tachyon, which arises when a Dp brane propagates in the vicinity of a stack of coincident NS5 branes, is due to the proper acceleration generated by the background dilaton field. We show that when a fundamental string (F-string), described by the Nambu–Goto action, is moving in the background of a stack of coincident Dp branes, the geometric tachyon mode can also appear since the overall conformal mode of the induced metric for the string can act as a source for proper acceleration. We also studied the detailed dynamics of the F-string as well as the instability by mapping the Nambu–Goto action of the F-string to the tachyon effective action of the non-BPS D-string. We qualitatively argue that the condensation of the geometric tachyon is responsible for the (F,Dp) bound state formation.