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Folding branes

2005; American Physical Society; Volume: 71; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1103/physrevd.71.126004

1550-7998

Omid Saremi, Lev Kofman, Amanda W. Peet,

Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena

We study classical dynamics of a probe $\mathrm{D}p$-brane moving in a background sourced by a stack of $\mathrm{D}p$-branes. In this context the physics is similar to that of the effective action for open-string tachyon condensation, but with a power-law runaway potential. We show that small inhomogeneous ripples of the probe brane embedding grow with time, leading to folding of the brane as it moves. We give a full nonlinear analytical treatment of inhomogeneous brane dynamics, suitable for the Dirac-Born-Infeld$\mathrm{\text{+Wess-Zumino}}$Wess-Zumino theory with arbitrary runaway potential, in the case where the source branes are Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS). In the near-horizon geometry, the inhomogeneous brane motion has a dual description in terms of free streaming of massive relativistic test particles originating from the initial hypersurface of the probe brane. We discuss limitations of the effective action description around loci of self-crossing of the probe brane (caustics). We also discuss the effect of brane folding in application to the theory of cosmological fluctuations in string theory inflation.