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Cohomology in the Pure Spinor Formalism for the Superstring

Nathan Berkovits
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Abstract

A manifestly super-Poincaré covariant formalism for the superstring has recently been constructed using a pure spinor variable. Unlike the covariant Green-Schwarz formalism, this new formalism is easily quantized with a BRST operator and tree-level scattering amplitudes have been evaluated in a manifestly covariant manner. In this paper, the cohomology of the BRST operator in the pure spinor formalism is shown to give the usual light-cone Green-Schwarz spectrum. Although the BRST operator does not directly involve the Virasoro constraint, this constraint emerges after expressing the pure spinor variable in terms of SO(8) variables.

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Nathan Berkovits. 2000-08-01. Cohomology in the Pure Spinor Formalism for the Superstring. https://doi.org/10.1088/1126-6708%2F2000%2F09%2F046

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