On Effective Actions for the Bosonic Tachyon

Abstract

We extend the analysis of hep-th/0304045 to the bosonic case and find the one-derivative effective action valid in the vicinity of rolling tachyons with an energy not larger than that of the original D-brane. For on-shell tachyons rolling down the well-behaved side of the potential in this theory, the energy is conserved and the pressure eventually decreases exponentially. For tachyons rolling down the ''wrong'' side, the pressure instead blows up in a finite time.

20 pages, 1 figure. v2: corrected typos, one reference added