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Published June 2004 | public
Journal Article

Decay modes of unstable strings in plane-wave string field theory

Abstract

The cubic interaction vertex of light-cone string field theory in the plane-wave background has a simple effective form when considering states with only bosonic excitations. This simple effective interaction vertex is used in this paper to calculate the three string interaction matrix elements for states of arbitrary bosonic excitation and these results are used to examine certain decay modes on the mass-shell. It is shown that the matrix elements of one string to two string decays involving only bosonic excitations will vanish to all orders in 1/μ on the mass-shell when the number of excitations on the initial string is less than or equal to two, but in general will not vanish when the number of excitations is greater than two. Also, a truncated calculation of the mass-shell matrix elements for one string to three string decays of two excitation states is performed and suggests that these matrix elements do not vanish on the mass-shell. There is, however, a quantitative discrepancy between this last result and its (also non-vanishing) gauge theory prediction from the BMN correspondence.

Additional Information

© 2004 SISSA/ISAS. Received: May 25, 2004. Revised: June 11, 2004. Accepted: June 15, 2004. I am very grateful to J. Schwarz and U. Gürsoy for useful discussions and comments. The work of P. B. is supported in part by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023