The strong energy condition and the S-brane singularity problem

Abstract

Recently it has been argued that, because tachyonic matter satisfies the Strong Energy Condition [SEC], there is little hope of avoiding the singularities which plague S-Brane spacetimes. Meanwhile, however, Townsend and Wohlfarth have suggested an ingenious way of circumventing the SEC in such situations, and other suggestions for actually violating it in the S-Brane context have recently been proposed. Of course, the natural context for discussions of [effective or actual] violations of the SEC is the theory of asymptotically deSitter spacetimes, which tend to be less singular than ordinary FRW spacetimes. However, while violating or circumventing the SEC is necessary if singularities are to be avoided, it is not at all clear that it is sufficient. That is, we can ask: would an asymptotically deSitter S-brane spacetime be non-singular? We show that this is difficult to achieve; this result is in the spirit of the recently proved "S-brane singularity theorem". Essentially our results suggest that circumventing or violating the SEC may not suffice to solve the S-Brane singularity problem, though we do propose two ways of avoiding this conclusion.

Particle Production on Half S-Brane

“…This process has recently attracted much attention [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10,12,21,22,23,24,21,27,28,11,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,41,42,43] 2 . S-branes have been also extensively studied in supergravity approach with potentially interesting cosmological applications [44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,…”

Dynamical evolution of phantom scalar perturbation in the Schwarzschild black string spacetime

“…Comparing with other dynamical scalar fields, the phantom field model is more interesting because that it has a negative kinetic energy which can be appeared in the quantum particle creation processes in curved backgrounds [5] or can be motivated from S-brane constructs in string theory [6]. The presence of such a negative kinetic energy leads to that the null energy condition is violated and the equation of state ω x of the phantom energy is less than −1.…”