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Title:
String theory in target space
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Abstract:
String theory is usually presented as a theory of strings, that is, through its world-sheet description. Apart from specific problems in this approach such as curved backgrounds, it also involves quite some in principle redundant information such as the worldsheet metric. A simple question is: can string theory be defined without this redundancy? Based on very-soon-to-appear work with Tobias Hansen I'll show a new working definition of tree level string theory in a flat target space. We present a small-ish set of conditions on string amplitudes in target space whose unique solution is argued to be the usual string S-matrix. Interestingly, the notions of critical dimension and intercept are shown to arise naturally by requiring locality and unitarity on four point amplitudes. I'll end with more questions than answers, but at least the questions are interesting and well-posed. In particular there seem to be no fundamental restrictions for extending our definition to generic curved spaces.
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