Hidden Symmetries of the Open N=2 String

Abstract

It is known for ten years that self-dual Yang-Mills theory is the effective field theory of the open N=2 string in 2+2 dimensional spacetime. We uncover an infinite set of abelian rigid string symmetries, corresponding to the symmetries and integrable hierarchy of the self-dual Yang-Mills equations. The twistor description of the latter naturally connects with the BRST approach to string quantization, providing an interpretation of the picture phenomenon in terms of the moduli space of string backgrounds.

24 pages, no figures; v2: typos corrected

References in corpus (7)

• Self-Dual Yang-Mills: Symmetries and Moduli Space
• On the Picture Dependence of Ramond-Ramond Cohomology
• Covariant field theory for self-dual strings
• N=2 Worldsheet Instantons Yield Cubic Self-Dual Yang-Mills
• Non-local symmetries of the closed N=2 string
• Chiral BRST Cohomology of N=2 Strings at Arbitrary Ghost and Picture Number
• Ward identities and the vanishing theorem for loop amplitudes of the closed N=2 string