Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published January 1, 2007 | public
Journal Article Open

Local recoil of extended solitons: a string theory example

Abstract

It is well-known that localized topological defects (solitons) experience recoil when they suffer an impact by incident particles. Higher-dimensional topological defects develop distinctive wave patterns propagating along their worldvolume under similar circumstances. For 1-dimensional topological defects (vortex lines), these wave patterns fail to decay in the asymptotic future: the propagating wave eventually displaces the vortex line a finite distance away from its original position (the distance is proportional to the transferred momentum). The quantum version of this phenomenon, which we call ``local recoil'', can be seen as a simple geometric manifestation of the absence of spontaneous symmetry breaking in 1+1 dimensions. Analogously to soliton recoil, local recoil of vortex lines is associated with infrared divergences in perturbative expansions. In perturbative string theory, such divergences appear in amplitudes for closed strings scattering off a static D1-brane. Through a Dirac-Born-Infeld analysis, it is possible to resum these divergences in a way that yields finite, momentum-conserving amplitudes.

Additional Information

© 2007 SISSA. Received 12 September 2006, accepted for publication 22 December 2006. Published 11 January 2007. We would like to thank J. Ambjørn for collaboration in the early stages of the project. We also thank J. de Boer, N. Dorey, M. Gaberdiel, M. Green, V. Hubeny, H. B. Nielsen, P. Olesen, J. Preskill, M. Rangamani and D. Tong for useful discussions. The work of B.C. was supported in part by Stichting FOM, by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office through the Interuniversity Attraction Pole P5/27, by the European Commission FP6 RTN programme MRTN-CT-2004-005104 and by the "FWO-Vlaanderen" through project G.0428.06. S.N. was supported in part by the SRC Program of the KOSEF through the Center for Quantum Space-time (CQUeST) of Sogang University with grant number R11-2005-021. S.N. also thanks the Niels Bohr Institute where a part of the present work was done. E-print number: hep-th/0608123

Files

CRAjhep07.pdf
Files (220.3 kB)
Name Size Download all
md5:955af8ad14bd96493159188aa533aa0d
220.3 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 16, 2023