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A Closed String Tachyon Vacuum ?

In bosonic closed string field theory the "tachyon potential" is a potential for the tachyon, the dilaton, and an infinite set of massive fields. Earlier computations of the potential did not include the dilaton and the critical point formed by the quadratic and cubic interactions was destroyed by the quartic tachyon term. We include the dilaton contributions to the potential and find that a critical point survives and appears to become more shallow. We are led to consider the existence of a closed string tachyon vacuum, a critical point with zero action that represents a state where space-time ceases to be dynamical. Some evidence for this interpretation is found from the study of the coupled metric-dilaton-tachyon effective field equations, which exhibit rolling solutions in which the dilaton runs to strong coupling and the Einstein metric undergoes collapse.