Abstract
QED with spinor matter is argued to correspond to the tensionless limit of spinning strings with contact interactions. The strings represent electric lines of force with charges at their ends. The interaction is constructed from a delta-function on the world-sheet which, although off-shell, decouples from the world-sheet metric. Integrating out the string degrees of freedom with fixed boundary generates the super-Wilson loop that couples spinor matter to electromagnetism in the world-line formalism. World-sheet and world-line, but not spacetime, supersymmetry underpin the model.
Highlights
Quantum Electrodynamics is perhaps the most successful physical theory to confront experiment, and so it might seem redundant to consider an alternative formulation
In this letter we treat QED by taking the electric lines of force as the basic degrees of freedom of the electromagnetic field. This immediately requires the technology of string theory but applied to a non-standard setting in which the ends of the lines of force are electrically charged particles and the electromagnetic interaction becomes a contact interaction described by δ-functions on the world-sheet
QED emerges in the tensionless limit, so that the strings representing the lines of force are potentially large, string corrections might set in at very large length scales
Summary
Quantum Electrodynamics is perhaps the most successful physical theory to confront experiment, and so it might seem redundant to consider an alternative formulation. In this letter we treat QED by taking the electric lines of force as the basic degrees of freedom of the electromagnetic field This immediately requires the technology of string theory but applied to a non-standard setting in which the ends of the lines of force are electrically charged particles and the electromagnetic interaction becomes a contact interaction described by δ-functions on the world-sheet. It is our purpose to show that this last step can be replaced by a functional integral over spinning strings spanning the closed loops B, so that together with the boundary action SBdV H and contact interactions we arrive at a string theory reformulation of QED
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call