Nowhere Vanishing Spinors and Topological Obstructions to the Equivalence of the Nsr and Gs Superstrings

Jul, 1987
25 pages
Published in:
  • Class.Quant.Grav. 5 (1988) 257
Report number:
  • Imperial/TP/86-87/28

Citations per year

198819962004201220193102
Abstract: (IOP)
Constructing an equivalence of the NSR and GS superstring formalisms in a general spacetime background involves relating the 8V, and 8S representations with the aid of a nowhere-vanishing Majorana-Weyl spinor on the eight-dimensional transverse space. The authors discuss the possibility of a global obstruction to the existence of such spinor fields and show that a necessary and sufficient condition for this to be absent is the vanishing of a certain linear combination of the characteristic classes of the spacetime.
  • MODEL: STRING
  • SUPERSYMMETRY
  • FIELD THEORY: SPACE-TIME
  • FIELD THEORY: BACKGROUND FIELD
  • FIELD THEORY: TWO-DIMENSIONAL
  • GROUP THEORY: SPINOR
  • SPINOR: GROUP THEORY
  • MATHEMATICAL METHODS: TOPOLOGICAL