Quantum Strings and Superstrings

We briefly cover the early history of supersymmetry, describe the relation of SUSY quantum field theories to superstring theories and explain why they are considered a likely tool to describe the phenomenology of high energy particle theory beyond the Standard Model.

In this paper we show that the holomorphic representation is appropriate for description in a consistent way string and string field theories, when the considered number of component fields of the string field is finite. A new Lagrangian for the closed string is obtained and shown to be equivalent to Nambu-Goto's Lagrangian. We give the notion of anti-string, evaluate the propagator for the string field, and calculate the convolution of two of them.

These lectures from the 1995 Trieste Summer School in High Energy Physics and Cosmology give an elementary introduction to perturbative superstring theory, superstring phenomenology, and the fermionic construction of perturbative string models.These lectures assume no prior knowledge of string theory.

This talk deals with the old problem of formulatingn a covariant quantum theory of superstrings, ``covariant'' here meaning having manifest Lorentz symmetry and supersymmetry. The advantages and disadvantages of several quantization methods are reviewed. Special emphasis is put on the approaches using twistorial variables, and the algebraic structures of these. Some unsolved problems are identified.

This paper is a collection of lecture notes on the superfield approach in three- and four-dimensional supersymmetric quantum field theory. Many examples of the applications of this approach to different superfield models are considered.

The present status of superstring phenomenology is briefly discussed.

We give a brief review of our approach to the quantization of superstrings. New is a covariant derivation of the measure at tree level and a path integral formula for this measure.

In the present paper we consider quantum theories obtained by quantization of classical theories with first-class constraints assuming that these constraints form a Lie algebra. We show that in this case, one can construct physical quantities of a new type. We apply this construction to string theory. We find that scattering amplitudes in critical bosonic closed string theory can be expressed in terms of physical quantities of the new type. Our techniques can be applied also ...

Although it is not known how to covariantly quantize the Green-Schwarz (GS) superstring, there exists a semi-light-cone gauge choice in which the GS superstring can be quantized in a conformally invariant manner. In this paper, we prove that BRST quantization of the GS superstring in semi-light-cone gauge is equivalent to BRST quantization using the pure spinor formalism for the superstring.

We study the covariant quantization of the Green-Schwarz (GS) superstrings proposed recently by Berkovits. In particular, we reformulate the Berkovits approach in a way that clarifies its relation with the GS approach and allows to derive in a straightforward way its extension to curved spacetime background. We explain the procedure working explicitly in the case of the heterotic string.