Chiral BRST Cohomology of N= 2 Strings at Arbitrary Ghost and Picture Number

Abstract:

We compute the BRST cohomology of the holomorphic part of the N= 1 string at arbitrary ghost and picture number. We confirm the expectation that the relative cohomology at non-zero momentum consists of a single massless state in each picture. The absolute cohomology is obtained by an independent method based on homological algebra. For vanishing momentum, the relative and absolute cohomologies both display a picture dependence – a phenomenon discovered recently also in the relative Ramond sector of N= 1 strings by Berkovits and Zwiebach [1].