Genus four superstring measures

A main issue in superstring theory are the superstring measures. DHoker and Phong showed that for genus two these reduce to measures on the moduli space of curves which are determined by modular forms of weight eight and the bosonic measure. They also suggested a generalisation to higher genus. We showed that their approach works, with a minor modification, in genus three and we announced a positive result also in genus four. Here we give the modular form in genus four explicitly. Recently S. Grushevsky published this result as part of a more general approach.

Two loop superstring amplitudes and S_6 representations

In this paper we describe how representation theory of groups can be used to shorten the derivation of two loop partition functions in string theory, giving an intrinsic description of modular forms appearing in the results of DHoker and Phong [1]. Our method has the advantage of using only algebraic properties of modular functions and it can be extended to any genus g.