Manifestly superPoincaré-covariant quantization of the Green-Schwarz superstring

Abstract

The Green-Schwarz (GS) superstring is reformulated in a physically equivalent way by embedding it into a larger system containing additional fermionic string-as well as bosonic harmonic variables and possessing additional gauge invariances. The main feature of the new GS superstring system is that it contains covariant and functionally independent first-class constraints only. This allows straightforward application of the BFV-BRST formalism for a manifestly superPoincaré-covariant canonical quantization. The corresponding BRST charge turns out to be of second rank and, therefore, the BFV-BRST action contains fourth-order ghost terms.