18 brane localized in the vicinity of the point source. This spike-like excitation can be interpreted as a fundamental string attached to the brane, or equivalently a tube of electric flux attached to the source. The fact that the transverse excitation is string-like and highly localized in the brane coordinates depends crucially on the specific nonlinearities of the DBI gauge action [20]. Similarly, one may construct a BPS configuration with a transverse string passing through the brane. Again the DBI dynamics will constrict the region through which the flux passes to a narrow tube. This analysis suggests that a tachyonic crystal of codimension-one D-branes will support string-like excitations which are stretched along the direction transverse to the local orientation of the branes. In this paper I have explored a scenario for the breakdown of the perturbative vacuum in asymptotically free gauge theory and the appearance of the physical vacuum as a laminated array of codimension-one membranes. The evidence that such a lamination of the vacuum occurs in 4-dimensional SU (3) Yang-Mills theory first appeared in Monte Carlo studies of topological charge [1]. In holographic QCD, the relevance of D6-branes for topological charge dynamics was first pointed out by Witten [6]. This work showed that, in large N HQCD, the basic objects that should appear in the vacuum as the carriers of topological charge should be codimension-one membranes rather than localized, quantized instantons. The observation of codimension-one topological charge membranes in Monte Carlo configurations provided a direct confirmation of Witten’s arguments. In addition, the Monte Carlo results showed that, not only does topological charge appear in the form of thin, extended, coherent membranes, but that the vacuum was essentially filled with a topological sandwich of closely spaced, alternating sign membranes. The central argument of this paper is that the observed alternating-sign sandwich array has a precise holographic interpretation as a tachyonic crystal, the expected decay product of a homogeneous, space-filling D7-brane. This presents an appealing scenario for the breakdown of the perturbative vacuum and the transition to the physical one by a lamination process that can be described in terms of an exactly marginal boundary perturbation in the conformal field theory of the coordinate along which the lamination occurs. In this respect, the local description of the vacuum lamination phenomenon should be very similar for 2-dimensional CP $^{N}$− 1 and 4-dimensional QCD, since both dynamics are described by the BCFT for a single spatial coordinate transverse to the array of codimension-one D-branes. To provide further support for the tachyon crystal model of the gauge theory vacuum, we pre- VI. DISCUSSION