Rolling Closed String Tachyons and the Big Crunch

We study the low-energy effective field equations that couple gravity, the dilaton, and the bulk closed string tachyon of bosonic closed string theory. We establish that whenever the tachyon induces the rolling process, the string metric remains fixed while the dilaton rolls to strong coupling. For negative definite potentials we show that this results in an Einstein metric that crunches the universe in finite time. This behavior is shown to be rather generic even if the potentials are not negative definite. The solutions are reminiscent of those in the collapse stage of a cyclic universe cosmology where scalar field potentials with negative energies play a central role.

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