Topological recursion for hyperbolic string field theory

Abstract

We derive an analog of Mirzakhani’s recursion relation for hyperbolic string vertices and investigate its implications for closed string field theory. Central to our construction are systolic volumes: the Weil-Petersson volumes of regions in moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces whose elements have systoles L ≥ 0. These volumes can be shown to satisfy a recursion relation through a modification of Mirzakhani’s recursion as long as L ≤ 2 sinh−1 1. Applying the pants decomposition of Riemann surfaces to off-shell string amplitudes, we promote this recursion to hyperbolic string field theory and demonstrate the higher order vertices are determined by the cubic vertex iteratively for any background. Such structure implies the solutions of closed string field theory obey a quadratic integral equation. We illustrate the utility of our approach in an example of a stubbed scalar theory.