Technical Overview
Tachyon condensation is a process in which a tachyonic field—usually a scalar field—with a complex mass acquires a vacuum expectation value and reaches the minimum of the potential energy. While the field is tachyonic (and unstable) near the original point—the local maximum of the potential—it gets a non-negative squared mass (and becomes stable) near the minimum.
The appearance of tachyons is a potentially serious problem for any theory; examples of tachyonic fields amenable to condensation are all cases of spontaneous symmetry breaking. In condensed matter physics a notable example is ferromagnetism; in particle physics the best known example is the Higgs mechanism in the standard model that breaks the electroweak symmetry.
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