Boundary states in the open string channel and CFT near a corner

Abstract

We generalize the idea of boundary states to the open string channel. They describe emission and absorption of open strings in the presence of intersecting D-branes. We construct the explicit oscillator representation for the free boson and fermionic ghost. The inner product of such states describes a disk amplitude of rectangular shape and possesses modular covariance with a nontrivial conformal weight. We compare the result obtained here with those obtained using two different methods, one employing the path integral formalism and one employing the conformal anomaly. We find that all these methods give consistent results. In our method, we must be careful in our treatment of the singularity of the CFT near the corners. Specifically, we derive the correction to the conformal weight of the primary field inserted at the corner, and it gives the modular weight of the rectangle amplitude. We also carry out explicit computations of the correlation functions.