Exact solutions and momentum couplings in the Dirac-Born-Infeld effective theory

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a general scalar field, a tachyon or an ordinary scalar, in the presence of world-volume massless fields in the DBI effective theory by exploring their exact solutions. The obtained solutions indicate that the effective mass of the general scalar on a uniformly moving D-brane decreases, even to zero. For the tachyon case, the result implies that unstable D-branes decay slower when moving faster. The effective mass is also reduced on D-strings or in the space-independent case on arbitrarily dimensional D-branes with constant electromagnetic fields. The result for a tachyon indicates that the electric fields tend to slow down while the magnetic fields tend to expedite the decay process of unstable D-branes. In the spacetime-dependent case, D$p$-branes with $p\geq2$ in the presence of constant electromagnetic fields can fluctuate only in some restricted modes so that they propagate no faster than light. We also find solutions showing that D$p$-branes ($p\geq2$) carrying a beam of electromagnetic waves are propagating together with the electromagnetic waves. On such D$p$-branes, the tachyon gets stable while the massive scalar gets unstable if we demand their spacetime-dependent solutions to be real.