Superstring Perturbation Theory and Ramond-Ramond Backgrounds

We write the type IIB worldsheet action in classes of bosonic curved backgrounds threaded with Ramond-Ramond fluxes. The fixing of the kappa symmetry in the light-cone gauge and the use of the Bianchi identities of the supergravity theory lead to an expression of a relatively simple form, yet rich with new physical information about how fundamental strings react to the presence of RR fields. The results are useful in particular to the study of vacuum structure and dynamics in...

These lectures provide an introduction to perturbative string theory and its construction on spaces with background Ramond flux. Traditional covariant quantization of the string and its connection with vertex operators and conformal invariance of the worldsheet theory are reviewed. A supersymmetric covariant quantization of the superstring in six and ten spacetime dimensions is discussed. Correlation functions are computed with these variables. Applications to strings in anti...

We study finite temperature string scale $AdS_3$ backgrounds. One background is $AdS_3 \times S^1 \times T^2$ in which the anti-de Sitter space-time and the circle are at the radius $\sqrt{\alpha'}$. Using path integral techniques, we show that the bulk spectrum includes a continuum of states as well as Ramond-Ramond ground states that agree with those of the symmetric orbifold of the two-torus after second quantization. We also examine the one-loop free energy of the backgro...

We describe in detail the solution of type IIB superstring theory in the maximally supersymmetric plane-wave background with constant null Ramond-Ramond 5-form field strength. The corresponding light-cone Green-Schwarz action found in hep-th/0112044 is quadratic in both bosonic and fermionic coordinates. We find the spectrum of the light-cone Hamiltonian and the string representation of the supersymmetry algebra. The superstring Hamiltonian has a ``harmonic-oscillator'' form ...

We explain how to build field theoretic observables from which the geometrical properties of a dual holographic formulation can be read off straightforwardly. In some cases this construction yields explicit and calculable models of emergent space. We illustrate the idea on the type IIB background generated by N D3-branes in the near horizon limit, for which a full derivation from first principles can be presented. The six transverse dimensions emerge at large N and we find th...

Present knowledge of higher-derivative terms in string effective actions is, with a few exceptions, restricted to the NS-NS sector, a situation which prevents the development of a variety of interesting applications for which the RR terms are relevant. We here provide the formalism as well as efficient techniques to determine the latter directly from string-amplitude calculations. As an illustration of these methods, we compute the dependence of the type-IIB action on the thr...

It is known that the sphere-level S-matrix element of four type II superstrings has one kinematic factor. At the low energy limit, this factor produces the kinematic factor of the corresponding Feynman amplitudes in the supergravity. It also produces higher-derivative couplings of four strings. In this paper, we explicitly calculate the kinematic factor of four RR states in the supergravity. Using this factor, we then find the eight-derivative P-even and P-odd couplings of fo...

We discuss the NSR formulation of the superstring action on AdS_5 X S^5 proposed recently by Kallosh and Tseytlin in the Green-Schwarz formalism.We show that the stress-energy tensor corresponding to the NSR action for AdS superstring contains the branelike terms, corresponding to exotic massless vertex operators (refered to as the branelike vertices). The corresponding sigma-model action has the manifest SO(1,3) X SO(6) invariance of superstring theory on AdS_5 X S^5. We arg...

We construct solutions of type IIB supergravity with non-trivial Ramond-Ramond 5-form in ten dimensions by replacing the transverse flat space of pp-wave backgrounds with exact $N=(4,4)$ $c=4$ superconformal field theory blocks. These solutions, which also include a dilaton and (in some cases) an anti-symmetric tensor field, lead to integrable models on the world-sheet in the light-cone gauge of string theory. In one instance we demonstrate explicitly the emergence of the com...

An explicitly exact superconformal description is provided to some classes of Type II string theories in non constant RR backgrounds. This is done by applying the manifest (2,2) approach of Berkovits and Maldacena to Type II strings and by studying the condition of exact conformal invariance of certain supersymmetric backgrounds. We find a new set of exact type IIA strings with non constant RR 2-form and 4-form curvatures and for type IIB with non constant 3-form curvature.