Twisted and unstable : approaches to the string equations of motion

In this thesis we will explore three approaches to aspects of the fundamental structure of string theory. We first provide a brief review of perturbative string theory, and briefly discuss how each of the three topics to be discussed in the body of this thesis depart from this starting point. We then study the open string one-loop tadpole diagram in Witten cubic open string field theory. We compute this diagram both analytically and numerically and study the divergences arising from the collective behavior of open string fields in the short-distance region of the diagram. We demonstrate that this region of the diagram encodes information about the linearized Einstein equation describing the shift in the closed string fields in reaction to the D-brane supporting the open strings. We also show that the manner in which this information is encoded is somewhat singular, and comment on the implications for the quantum consistency of open bosonic string field theory. We next compute the closed string radiation from a decaying D-brane in type II string theory. The calculation is made possible by noting that the integrals involved in the requisite disk one-point functions reduce to integrals over the group manifold of a product of unitary groups.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Physics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Shelton, Jessie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Washington Taylor, IV.

• Physics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36813

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36813