Conformal Invariance of the Pure Spinor Superstring in a Curved Background

It is shown that the pure spinor formulation of the heterotic superstring in a generic gravitational and super Yang-Mills background has vanishing one-loop beta functions.Comment: Reference adde

D-term inflation and neutrino mass

We study a $D$-term inflation scenario in a model extended from the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) by two additional abelian factor groups focussing on its particle physics aspects. Condensates of the fields related to the inflation can naturally give a possible solution to both the $\mu$-problem in the MSSM and the neutrino mass through their nonrenormalizable couplings to the MSSM fields. Mixings between neutrinos and neutralinos are also induced by some of these condensates. Small neutrino masses are generated by a weak scale seesaw mechanism as a result of these mixings. Moreover, the decay of the condensates may be able to cause the leptogenesis. Usually known discrepancy between both values of a Fayet-Iliopoulos $D$-term which are predicted by the COBE normalization and also by an anomalous U(1) in the weakly-coupled superstring might be reconciled.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX, small modifications, one reference adde

Hot String Soup

Above the Hagedorn energy density closed fundamental strings form a long string phase. The dynamics of weakly interacting long strings is described by a simple Boltzmann equation which can be solved explicitly for equilibrium distributions. The average total number of long strings grows logarithmically with total energy in the microcanonical ensemble. This is consistent with calculations of the free single string density of states provided the thermodynamic limit is carefully defined. If the theory contains open strings the long string phase is suppressed.Comment: 13 pages, no figures, uses LaTex, some errors in equations have been corrected, NSF-ITP-94-83, UCSBTH-94-3

Fermions, T-duality and effective actions for D-branes in bosonic backgrounds

We find the effective action for any D-brane in a general bosonic background of supergravity. The results are explicit in component fields up to second order in the fermions and are obtained in a covariant manner. No interaction terms between fermions and the field $f=b+F$, characteristic of the bosonic actions, are considered. These are reserved for future work. In order to obtain the actions, we reduce directly from the M2-brane world-volume action to the D2-brane world-volume action. Then, by means of T-duality, we obtain the other Dp-brane actions. The resulting Dp-brane actions can be written in a single compact and elegant expression.Comment: 22 pages, latex, version published by JHEP plus typos corrected in eq.(44) and eq.(47

Quantum States, Thermodynamic Limits and Entropy in M-Theory

We discuss the matching of the BPS part of the spectrum for (super)membrane, which gives the possibility of getting membrane's results via string calculations. In the small coupling limit of M--theory the entropy of the system coincides with the standard entropy of type IIB string theory (including the logarithmic correction term). The thermodynamic behavior at large coupling constant is computed by considering M--theory on a manifold with topology ${\mathbb T}^2\times{\mathbb R}^9$. We argue that the finite temperature partition functions (brane Laurent series for $p \neq 1$) associated with BPS $p-$brane spectrum can be analytically continued to well--defined functionals. It means that a finite temperature can be introduced in brane theory, which behaves like finite temperature field theory. In the limit $p \to 0$ (point particle limit) it gives rise to the standard behavior of thermodynamic quantities.Comment: 7 pages, no figures, Revtex style. To be published in the Physical Review

Cosmological String Gas on Orbifolds

It has long been known that strings wound around incontractible cycles can play a vital role in cosmology. In particular, in a spacetime with toroidal spatial hypersurfaces, the dynamics of the winding modes may help yield three large spatial dimensions. However, toroidal compactifications are phenomenologically unrealistic. In this paper we therefore take a first step toward extending these cosmological considerations to $D$-dimensional toroidal orbifolds. We use numerical simulation to study the timescales over which "pseudo-wound" strings unwind on these orbifolds with trivial fundamental group. We show that pseudo-wound strings can persist for many ``Hubble times'' in some of these spaces, suggesting that they may affect the dynamics in the same way as genuinely wound strings. We also outline some possible extensions that include higher-dimensional wrapped branes.Comment: 14 pages, 8 eps fig

Decoupling of Degenerate Positive-norm States in Witten's String Field Theory

We show that the degenerate positive-norm physical propagating fields of the open bosonic string can be gauged to the higher rank fields at the same mass level. As a result, their scattering amplitudes can be determined from those of the higher spin fields. This phenomenon arises from the existence of two types of zero-norm states with the same Young representations as those of the degenerate positive-norm states in the old covariant first quantized (OCFQ) spectrum. This is demonstrated by using the lowest order gauge transformation of Witten's string field theory (WSFT) up to the fourth massive level (spin-five), and is found to be consistent with conformal field theory calculation based on the first quantized generalized sigma-model approach. In particular, on-shell conditions of zero-norm states in OCFQ stringy gauge transformation are found to correspond, in a one-to-one manner, to the background ghost fields in off-shell gauge transformation of WSFT. The implication of decoupling of scalar modes on Sen's conjectures was also briefly discussed.Comment: 18 pages, use Latex with revtex

N=1/2 quiver gauge theories from open strings with R-R fluxes

We consider a four dimensional N=1 gauge theory with bifundamental matter and a superpotential, defined on stacks of fractional branes. By turning on a flux for the R-R graviphoton field strength and computing open string amplitudes with insertions of R-R closed string vertices, we introduce a non-anticommutative deformation and obtain the N=1/2 version of the theory. We also comment on the appearance of a new structure in the effective Lagrangian.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, JHEP class (included); some comments and a reference adde

Non-Localizability and Asymptotic Commutativity

The mathematical formalism commonly used in treating nonlocal highly singular interactions is revised. The notion of support cone is introduced which replaces that of support for nonlocalizable distributions. Such support cones are proven to exist for distributions defined on the Gelfand-Shilov spaces $S^\beta$, where $0<\beta <1$ . This result leads to a refinement of previous generalizations of the local commutativity condition to nonlocal quantum fields. For string propagators, a new derivation of a representation similar to that of K\"{a}llen-Lehmann is proposed. It is applicable to any initial and final string configurations and manifests exponential growth of spectral densities intrinsic in nonlocalizable theories.Comment: This version is identical to the initial one whose ps and pdf files were unavailable, with few corrections of misprint

Could thermal fluctuations seed cosmic structure?

We examine the possibility that thermal, rather than quantum, fluctuations are responsible for seeding the structure of our universe. We find that while the thermalization condition leads to nearly Gaussian statistics, a Harrisson-Zeldovich spectrum for the primordial fluctuations can only be achieved in very special circumstances. These depend on whether the universe gets hotter or colder in time, while the modes are leaving the horizon. In the latter case we find a no-go theorem which can only be avoided if the fundamental degrees of freedom are not particle-like, such as in string gases near the Hagedorn phase transition. The former case is less forbidding, and we suggest two potentially successful ``warming universe'' scenarios. One makes use of the Phoenix universe, the other of ``phantom'' matter.Comment: minor corrections made, references added, matches the version accepted to PR