All the fundamental massless bosonic fields in superstring theory

Abstract

AbstractA systematic analysis of all the massless bosonic fields in superstring theory is carried out. Emphasis is put on the derivation of their propagators, their polarization aspects and the investigation of their underlying constraints as well as their number of degrees of freedom. The treatment is given in the presence of external sources, in the celebrated Coulomb gauge, ensuring the positivity of the formalism ‐ a result which is also established in the process. The challenge here is the investigation involved in the self‐dual fourth rank anti‐symmetric tensor field. No constraints are imposed on the external sources so that their components may be varied independently, thus the complete expressions of the propagators may be obtained. As emphasized in our earlier work, the latter condition is an important one in dynamical theories with constraints giving rise to modifications as Faddeev‐Popov factors. The analysis is carried out in 10 dimensions, not only because of the consistency requirement by the superstrings, but also in order to take into account of the self‐duality character of the fourth rank anti‐symmetric tensor field as spelled out in the paper.