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I would like to know if there is any similarity between electron positron annihilation and brane anti-brane annihilation? Is it there then can we use electron positron annihilation knowledge to study more about brane anti-brane annihilation and there by string theory?

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Yes, the brane-antibrane annihilation is analogous to the electron-positron annihilation. The analogy is closest for the annihilation of a D0-brane (a charged particle) and an anti-D0-brane, of course.

The processes in string theory have more structure and mutual relationships than simple processes in quantum electrodynamics so a meaningful direction of the insights goes in the opposite direction. By looking at string theory, one may gain new perspectives on seemingly mundane processes in simple theories such as annihilation in quantum electrodynamics.

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In this case, though, the tachyon condensation has no analog, and I was always mystified by the identity of the tachyon condensed vacuum with the empty vacuum--- do you know how this works in detail? I looked at Sen's paper, but I was hoping for a string field theory free approach. – Ron Maimon Sep 18 '12 at 13:05
Well, there's no explicit tachyon field in QED that would be responsible for the annihilation - each electron-positron pair would need its own tachyon field, after all. But the physical phenomena may still be continuously connected between the QED picture and the string picture. There's no qualitative equivalence between the theories, however: QED is not type IIa string theory. – Luboš Motl Sep 18 '12 at 14:49
Thanx for you answer. NOw presuming that your answer of having similarity is correct , then can we do time analysis(say Fourier transform or DFT or curve fitting similar to POSFIT) of annihilation photon captured by say Ge(li) detector will yield the process of string dimensions coming from D8 to D0 ??????? – user12501 Sep 25 '12 at 4:02

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