Exact Results on Twist Anomaly

Abstract

In vacuum string field theory, the sliver state solution has been proposed as a candidate of a D-brane configuration. Physical observables associated with this solution, such as its energy density and the tachyon mass, are written in terms of the Neumann coefficients. These observables, though vanish naively due to twist symmetry, acquire non-vanishing values arising from their singular behavior. Therefore, this phenomenon is called twist anomaly. In this paper we present an analytical derivation of these physical observables with the help of the star algebra spectroscopy. We also identify in our derivation the origin of the twist anomaly in the finite-size matrix regularization.