D-brane boundary states in the pure spinor superstring

Abstract

We study the construction of D-brane boundary states in the pure spinor formalism for the quantisation of the superstring. This is achieved both via a direct analysis of the definition of D-brane boundary states in the pure spinor conformal field theory, as well as via comparison between standard RNS and pure spinor descriptions of the superstring. Regarding the map between RNS and pure spinor formulations of the superstring, we shed new light on the tree level zero mode saturation rule. Within the pure spinor formalism we propose an explicit expression for the D-brane boundary state in a flat spacetime background. While the non-zero mode sector mostly follows from a simple understanding of the pure spinor conformal field theory, the zero mode sector requires a deeper analysis which is one of the main points in this work. With the construction of the boundary states at hand, we give a prescription for calculating scattering amplitudes in the presence of a D-brane. Finally, we also briefly discuss the coupling to the world-volume gauge field and show that the D-brane low-energy effective action is correctly reproduced.