Pure spinors, twistors, and emergent supersymmetry

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Abstract

Starting with a classical action whose matter variables are a d = 10 spacetime vector x m and a pure spinor λ α , the pure spinor formalism for the superstring is obtained by gauge-fixing the twistor-like constraint ∂x m (γ m λ) α = 0. The fermionic variables θ α are Faddeev-Popov ghosts coming from this gauge-fixing and replace the usual (b, c) ghosts coming from gauge-fixing the Virasoro constraint. After twisting the ghost-number such that θ α has ghost-number zero and λ α has ghost-number one, the BRST cohomology contains the usual spacetime supersymmetric states of the superstring.

Keywords

Superstrings and Heterotic Strings BRST Symmetry 
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Copyright information

© SISSA, Trieste, Italy 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.ICTP South American Institute for Fundamental Research, Instituto de Física TeóricaUniversidade Estadual PaulistaSão PauloBrasil
  2. 2.Kavli Institute for Theoretical PhysicsUniversity of CaliforniaSanta BarbaraU.S.A.

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