Green Schwarz Superstring on a pp-wave Ramond-Ramond background.

Abstract

Abstract The discovery of the dualities between the large N gauge theories and the string theories on the particular curved backgrounds has made the later subject of much study over the last decade. Of particular interest is the string theory on AdSz, x S 5 which was shown by Maladacena to be dual to the conforma Af = 4 lsuper Yang-Mills theory. This string theory, however, is difficult to quantize and it proved useful to work in the specific Penros AdS$e limi x St o 5 . f the String theory on this limit, called pp-wave background, proved to be explicitly quantizable and furthermore it turned out to be itself a dual of the particular limit of the corresponding Conformal Field Theory. It became therefore an important case for testing the principles of AdS/CFT the correspondence. The properties of the string theory on this background have been studied extensively by Metsaev and Metsaev and Tseytlin in the papers hep-th/0112044 and hep-th/0202109 and this thesis is mostly a review of their results. The type IIB superstring action is constructed and quantized on the background and the supergravity spectrum of the theory is found. Finally some results concerning two-point functions and vertex operators, not given in Metsaev, are derived.