No Arabic abstract
We study the world-volume theory of a bosonic membrane perturbatively and discuss if one can obtain any conditions on the number of space-time dimensions from the consistency of the theory. We construct an action which is suitable for such a study. In order to study the theory perturbatively we should specify a classical background around which perturbative expansion is defined. We will discuss the conditions which such a background should satisfy to deduce the critical dimension. Unfortunately we do not know any background satisfying such conditions. In order to get indirect evidences for the critical dimension of the membrane, we next consider two string models obtained via double dimensional reduction of the membrane. The first one reduces to the Polyakov string theory in the conformal gauge. The second one is described by the Schild action. We show that the critical dimension is 26 for these string theories, which implies that the critical dimension is 27 for the membrane theory.
Recently Sekino and Yoneya proposed a way to regularize the world volume theory of membranes wrapped around $S^1$ by matrices and showed that one obtains matrix string theory as a regularization of such a theory. We show that this correspondence between matrix string theory and wrapped membranes can be obtained by using the usual M(atrix) theory techniques. Using this correspondence, we construct the super-Poincare generators of matrix string theory at the leading order in the perturbation theory. It is shown that these generators satisfy 10 dimensional super-Poincare algebra without any anomaly.
Two-dimensional fermionic string theory is shown to have a structure of topological model, which is isomorphic to a tensor product of two topological ghost systems independent of each other. One of them is identified with $c=1$ bosonic string theory while the other has trivial physical contents. This fact enables us to regard two-dimensional fermionic string theory as an embedding of $c=1$ bosonic string theory in the moduli space of fermionic string theories. Upon this embedding, the discrete states of $c=1$ string theory are mapped to those of fermionic string theory, which is considered to be the origin of the similarity between the physical spectra of these two theories. We also discuss a novel BRST operator associated with this topological structure.
Starting from the amplitude with an arbitrary number of massless closed states of the bosonic string, we compute the soft limit when one of the states becomes soft to subsubleading order in the soft momentum expansion, and we show that when the soft state is a graviton or a dilaton, the full string amplitude can be expressed as a soft theorem through subsubleading order. It turns out that there are string corrections to the field theoretical limit in the case of a soft graviton, while for a soft dilaton the string corrections vanish. We then show that the new soft theorems, including the string corrections, can be simply obtained from the exchange diagrams where the soft state is attached to the other external states through the three-point string vertex of three massless states. In the soft-limit, the propagator of the exchanged state is divergent, and at tree-level these are the only divergent contributions to the full amplitude. However, they do not form a gauge invariant subset and must be supplemented with extra non-singular terms. The requirement of gauge invariance then fixes the complete amplitude through subsubleading order in the soft expansion, reproducing exactly what one gets from the explicit calculation in string theory. From this it is seen that the string corrections at subsubleading order arise as a consequence of the three-point amplitude having string corrections in the bosonic string. When specialized to a soft dilaton, it remarkably turns out that the string corrections vanish and that the non-singular piece of the subsubleading term of the dilaton soft theorem is the generator of space-time special conformal transformation.
In this note, we construct a BRST invariant cubic vertex for massless fields of arbitrary mixed symmetry in flat space-time. The construction is based on the vertex given in bosonic Open String Field Theory. The algebra of gauge transformations is closed without any additional, higher than cubic, couplings due to the presence of an infinite tower of massless fields. We briefly discuss the generalization of this result to a curved space-time and other possible implications.
We construct, in the closed bosonic string, the multiloop amplitude involving $N$ tachyons and one massless particle with $26 -D$ compactified directions, and we show that at least for $D>4$, the soft behaviors of the graviton and dilaton satisfy the same soft theorems as at the tree level, up to one additional term at the subsubleading order, which can only contribute to the dilaton soft behavior and which we show is zero at least at one loop. This is possible, since the infrared divergences due to the non-vanishing tachyon and dilaton tadpoles do not depend on the number of external particles and are therefore the same both in the amplitude with the soft particle and in the amplitude without the soft particle. Therefore this leaves unchanged the soft operator acting on the amplitude without the soft particle. The additional infrared divergence appearing for $D leq 4$ depend on the number of external legs and must be understood on their own.