Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,047 questions , 2,200 unanswered
5,345 answers , 22,709 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
816 active unimported users
More ...

  Witten's Open String Field Theory vs. Light Cone Quantization?

+ 3 like - 0 dislike
703 views

I am a quite confused on the differences between these two formulations of open string field theory, and am unable to reconcile how they are related. M. Kaku's 1972 paper formulates a string field theory based on second quantization and calculates a propagator and scattering amplitude with this. However, Witten's cubic open string field theory seems, at first glance, quite different. Is there a way to connect these? Is the answer just to say, "Well, the scattering amplitudes are the same for both of these separate pictures, so they are the same"?


This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2017-01-05 11:15 (UTC), posted by SE-user user138565

asked Dec 7, 2016 in Theoretical Physics by user138565 (30 points) [ revision history ]
edited Jan 5, 2017 by Dilaton

1 Answer

+ 0 like - 0 dislike

The relation between covariant and lightcone gauge string field theories is unknown.

In principle, the relation should be analogous to the relation between the path integral and lightcone gauge Hamiltonian formulations of Yang-Mills theory.

For free string field theories, this analogy can be made precise. At the interacting level, things do not work so easily. The main difficulty is that covariant string field theories contain an infinite number of time derivatives in their interactions, so one does not know how to pass to the Hamiltonian formalism and impose canonical commutation relations. A related problem is that the interaction vertices in covariant and lightcone theories have a very different structure.

My guess is that the infinite time derivatives in covariant string field theories is an artifact of the choice of field variable. With a field redefinition it should be possible to obtain a gauge invariant (but not covariant) string field theory which is local in lightcone time. Then one should be able to fix lightcone gauge and pass to the Hamiltonian formalism to obtain the lightcone string field theory.

I only have the haziest idea of how one might go about constructing such a field redefinition. This is not something people think about these days, and generally there are very few people working on string field theory. However, I think this problem is a "slumbering giant" whose solution could have a big impact.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2017-01-05 11:15 (UTC), posted by SE-user Ted Erler
answered Jan 4, 2017 by Ted Erler (10 points) [ no revision ]

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ysicsOverf$\varnothing$ow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...