Abstract
This chapter introduces the technical details of the quantization of the closed superstring, prerequisite for subsequent chapters. Beginning with the closed superstring action, discussion quickly progresses to conformal invariance and nonzero conformal anomaly. It is then shown that, upon gauge fixing and the associated introduction of ghost fields, we can eliminate the anomaly if spacetime is 10 dimensional. Once the conformal anomaly is dealt with, modular invariance and BRST quantization are addressed. We conclude with discussion of the GSO projection, the mechanism that projects out the tachyonic ground state in the NS sector of the theory.
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Notes
- 1.
Strings with bosonic worldsheet fields only.
- 2.
Well, there are really three problems with the state space, but we will deal with the issue of the GSO projection in the next section.
- 3.
This final point relies on the fact that there are no ghost number − 1 states.
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Moore, D.G. (2016). Introduction to Superstrings. In: The Landscape of Free Fermionic Gauge Models. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24618-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24618-5_2
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