Windings of twisted strings

Abstract

Twistor string models have been known for more than a decade now but have come back under the spotlight recently with the advent of the scattering equation formalism which has greatly generalized the scope of these models. A striking ubiquitous feature of these models has always been that, contrary to usual string theory, they do not admit vibrational modes and thus describe only conventional field theory. In this paper we report on the surprising discovery of a whole new sector of one of these theories which we call "twisted strings," when spacetime has compact directions. We find that the spectrum is enhanced from a finite number of states to an infinite number of interacting higher spin massive states. We describe both bosonic and world sheet supersymmetric models, their spectra and scattering amplitudes. These models have distinctive features of both string and field theory, for example they are invariant under stringy T-duality but have the high energy behavior typical of field theory. Therefore they describe a new kind of field theories in target space, sitting on their own halfway between string and field theory.

6 pages. v2 : a few clarifications and references added. v3 : published PRD version

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Scattering Amplitudes from Intersection Theory
• Aspects of Scattering Amplitudes and Moduli Space Localization
• From Infinity to Four Dimensions: Higher Residue Pairings and Feynman Integrals
• Two-Loop Scattering Amplitudes from Ambitwistor Strings: from Genus Two to the Nodal Riemann Sphere
• Remarks on the non-Riemannian sector in Double Field Theory
• Chiral strings, the sectorized description and their integrated vertex operators
• A Note on Circle Compactification of Tensile Ambitwistor String
• Massive strings from a haunted field theory
• Gravitational Scattering in the High-Energy Limit
• Exotic Aspects of Extended Field Theories
• On an alternative quantization of R-NS strings