Rolling Near the Tachyon Vacuum

Abstract

In a linear dilaton background, it has been argued that an unstable D-brane can decay to the tachyon vacuum without leaving behind a remnant of tachyon matter. Here we address the question of how the D-brane can decay to the tachyon vacuum when the tachyon vacuum does not support physical fluctuations. Using the formalism of open string field theory, we find that the tachyon vacuum {\it can} support fluctuations provided they are "hidden" as nonperturbative effects behind a pure gauge asymptotic series.