A New Action for Superstring Field Theory
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866917294595112960 |
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| author | Hull, Chris |
| author_facet | Hull, Chris |
| contents | Sen's superstring field theory successfully formulates perturbative superstring theory but has a number of unusual features. The action is not background independent and the resulting effective field theory does not appear to have standard diffeomorphsim symmetry - instead there is an exotic gauge symmetry that acts on some fields but not others. A new action is found that reduces to Sen's action in a certain limit and gives the same results as Sen's theory for physical superstring amplitudes. However, the new theory is background independent: there is a shift symmetry so that a change in the background can be compensated for by a corresponding shift in the string fields. Sen's theory has two string fields leading to the physical interacting superstring plus a free superstring that decouples from the physical superstring. The new terms in the action give self-interactions to the second superstring which remains decoupled from the physical superstring. The two superstrings each have a graviton and the effective action for the two gravitons coupled to a background metric is studied and shown to be background independent and diffeomorphism invariant, and the origin of further diffeomorphism-like symmetries is explained. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_03902 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A New Action for Superstring Field Theory Hull, Chris High Energy Physics - Theory Sen's superstring field theory successfully formulates perturbative superstring theory but has a number of unusual features. The action is not background independent and the resulting effective field theory does not appear to have standard diffeomorphsim symmetry - instead there is an exotic gauge symmetry that acts on some fields but not others. A new action is found that reduces to Sen's action in a certain limit and gives the same results as Sen's theory for physical superstring amplitudes. However, the new theory is background independent: there is a shift symmetry so that a change in the background can be compensated for by a corresponding shift in the string fields. Sen's theory has two string fields leading to the physical interacting superstring plus a free superstring that decouples from the physical superstring. The new terms in the action give self-interactions to the second superstring which remains decoupled from the physical superstring. The two superstrings each have a graviton and the effective action for the two gravitons coupled to a background metric is studied and shown to be background independent and diffeomorphism invariant, and the origin of further diffeomorphism-like symmetries is explained. |
| title | A New Action for Superstring Field Theory |
| topic | High Energy Physics - Theory |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03902 |