Background charges and consistent continuous deformations of $2d$ gravity theories

Abstract

We construct and discuss all background charges and continuous consistent deformations of standard $2d$ gravity theories with scalar matter fields. It turns out that the background charges and those deformations which change nontrivially both the form of the action and of its gauge symmetries are closely linked and exist only if the target space has at least one special (`covariantly constant') Killing vector which must be a null vector in the case of the deformations. The deformed actions provide interesting novel $2d$ gravity models. We argue that some of them lead to non-critical string theories.

9 pages, LaTeX. Changes in the discussion on the Liouville field

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Local BRST cohomology in gauge theories
• A derivation of Weyl gravity
• Consistent gravitational anomalies for chiral bosons
• Cohomological analysis of bosonic D-strings and 2d sigma models coupled to abelian gauge fields
• Actions and symmetries of NSR superstrings and D-strings