Boundary terms in string field theory
Name
13130_2025_Article_25499.pdf
Size
444.38 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
98142f5a309f15b8656763d2b695d33a
Author(s)
Fırat, Atakan H.
Mamade, Raji A.
Date Issued
February 11, 2025
Journal
Journal of High Energy Physics
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Citation
Fırat, A.H., Mamade, R.A. Boundary terms in string field theory. J. High Energ. Phys. 2025, 58 (2025).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We supplement the string field theory action with boundary terms to make its variational principle well-posed. Central to our considerations is the violation of the stress-energy tensor conservation in non-compact CFTs due to the boundary terms. This manifests as the failure of the cyclicity of the BRST operator, which encodes the target space integration by parts identities at the level of the worldsheet. Using this failure, we argue that the free closed string field theory action admits a well-posed variational principle upon including an additional boundary contribution. We explicitly work out the resulting action up to the massless level and show that it is related to the expansion of the low-energy effective string action endowed with the Gibbons-Hawking-York term on a flat background. We also discuss the structure of the boundary terms in the interacting theory.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2025)058
