In this paper we present two (a priori independent) derivations of the eikonal operator in string-brane scattering. The first one is obtained by summing surfaces with any number of boundaries, while in the second one the eikonal operator is derived f
rom the three-string vertex in a suitable light-cone gauge. This second derivation shows that the bosonic oscillators present in the leading eikonal operator are to be identified with the string bosonic oscillators in a suitable light-cone gauge, while the first one shows that it exponentiates recovering unitarity. This paper is a review of results obtained in two previous publications of the same authors.
We reproduce the asymptotic expansion of the D1D5 microstate geometries by computing the emission amplitudes of closed string states from disks with mixed D1D5 boundary conditions. Thus we provide a direct link between the supergravity and D-brane de
scriptions of the D1D5 microstates at non-zero string coupling. Microscopically, the profile functions characterizing the microstate solutions are encoded in the choice of a condensate for the twisted open string states connecting D1 and D5 branes.
Kaluza-Klein compactifications of higher dimensional Yang-Mills theories contain a number of four dimensional scalars corresponding to the internal components of the gauge field. While at tree-level the scalar zero modes are massless, it is well know
n that quantum corrections make them massive. We compute these radiative corrections at 1-loop in an effective field theory framework, using the background field method and proper Schwinger-time regularization. In order to clarify the proper treatment of the sum over KK--modes in the effective field theory approach, we consider the same problem in two different UV completions of Yang-Mills: string theory and lattice field theory. In both cases, when the compactification radius $R$ is much bigger than the scale of the UV completion ($R gg sqrt{alpha},a$), we recover a mass renormalization that is independent of the UV scale and agrees with the one derived in the effective field theory approach. These results support the idea that the value of the mass corrections is, in this regime, universal for any UV completion that respects locality and gauge invariance. The string analysis suggests that this property holds also at higher loops. The lattice analysis suggests that the mass of the adjoint scalars appearing in $mathcal N=2,4$ Super Yang-Mills is highly suppressed due to an interplay between the higher-dimensional gauge invariance and the degeneracy of bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom.
