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The Bosonic Ancestor of Closed and Open Fermionic Strings

Francois Englert·Laurent Houart·Anne Taormina
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Abstract

We review the emergence of the ten-dimensional fermionic closed string theories from subspaces of the Hilbert space of the 26-dimensional bosonic closed string theory compactified on an $E_8\times SO(16)$ lattice. They arise from a consistent truncation procedure which generates space-time fermions out of bosons. This procedure is extended to open string sectors. We prove, from bosonic considerations alone, that truncation of the unique tadpole-free $SO(2^{13})$ bosonic string theory compactified on the above lattice determines the anomaly free Chan-Paton group of the Type I theory. It also yields the Chan-Paton groups making Type O theories tadpole-free. These results establish a link between all M-theory strings and the bosonic string within the framework of conformal field theory. Its significance is discussed.

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Francois Englert, Laurent Houart, Anne Taormina. 2002-03-11. The Bosonic Ancestor of Closed and Open Fermionic Strings. https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0203098

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