In the presence of a confining flux tube between a pair of sources the vacuum is no longer Poincare invariant. This symmetry is nonlinearly realized in the effective string action. A general method for finding a large class of Lorentz invariant contributions to the action is described. The relationship between this symmetry and diffeomorphism invariance is further investigated.
We review the current knowledge about the theoretical foundations of the effective string theory for confining flux tubes and the comparison of the predictions to pure gauge lattice data. A concise presentation of the effective string theory is provided, incorporating recent developments. We summarize the predictions for the spectrum and the profile/width of the flux tube and their comparison to lattice data. The review closes with a short summary of open questions for future research.
A covariant calculus for the construction of effective string theories is developed. Effective string theory, describing quantum string-like excitations in arbitrary dimension, has in the past been constructed using the principles of conformal field theory, but not in a systematic way. Using the freedom of choice of field definition, a particular field definition is made in a systematic way to allow an explicit construction of effective string theories with manifest exact conformal symmetry. The impossibility of a manifestly invariant description of the Polchinski-Strominger Lagrangian is demonstrated and its meaning is explained.
The mean-square width of the energy profile of bosonic string is calculated considering two boundary terms in the effective action. The perturbative expansion of the Lorentz-invariant boundary terms at the second and the fourth order in the effective action is taken around the free Nambu-Goto action. The calculation are presented for open strings with Dirichlet boundary condition on cylinder.
We show, by explicit calculation, that the next correction to the universal Luescher term in the effective string theories of Polchinski and Strominger is also universal. We find that to this order in inverse string-length, the ground-state energy as well as the excited-state energies are the same as those given by the Nambu-Goto string theory, the difference being that while the Nambu-Goto theory is inconsistent outside the critical dimension, the Polchinski-Strominger theory is by construction consistent for any space-time dimension. Our calculation explicitly avoids the use of any field redefinitions as they bring in many other issues that are likely to obscure the main points.
We present a study of the effective string that describes the infrared dynamics of SU(2) Yang-Mills theory in three dimensions. By combining high-precision lattice simulation results for Polyakov-loop correlators at finite temperatures close to (and less than) the deconfinement one with the analytical constraints from renormalization-group arguments, from the exact integrability of the two-dimensional Ising model that describes the universality class of the critical point of the theory, from conformal perturbation theory, and from Lorentz invariance, we derive tight quantitative bounds on the corrections to the effective string action beyond the Nambu-Goto approximation. We show that these corrections are compatible with the predictions derived from a bootstrap analysis of the effective string theory, but are inconsistent with the axionic string ansatz.