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arXiv · 1212.0271

Bosonic string theory with dust

Jack Gegenberg·Viqar Husain
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Abstract

We study a modified bosonic string theory that has a pressureless ``dust'' field on the string worldsheet. The dust is a real scalar field with unit gradient which breaks conformal invariance. Hamiltonian analysis reveals a time reparametrization constraint linear in the dust field momentum and a spatial diffeomorphism constraint. This feature provides a natural ``dust time" gauge in analogy with the parametrized particle. In this gauge we give a Fock quantization of the theory, which is complete and self-consistent in d<26. The Hamiltonian of the theory is not a constraint; as a consequence the Hilbert space and mass spectrum are characterized by an additional parameter, and includes the usual string spectrum as a special case. The other sectors provide new particle spectra, some of which do not have tachyons.

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Jack Gegenberg, Viqar Husain. 2014-03-04. Bosonic string theory with dust. https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0271

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