On the Correspondence of Open and Closed Strings

Baumgartl, Marcus (2007): On the Correspondence of Open and Closed Strings. Dissertation, LMU München: Faculty of Physics

Abstract

The topic of this thesis is the correspondence of open and closed strings. Already for a long time it has been evident that those both sectors of string theory do not only couple to each other, but it is also possible to identify excitations of the closed string in the open string sector. This correspondence has been shown in a multitude of examples, which indicates a deep connection. This thesis tries to understand this from the viewpoint of coupled open-closed moduli spaces and finally from a string field theoretic point of view. Implications of this conjectures correspondence have gained great importance, among them gauge-gravity correspondence, AdS/CFT correspondence as well as non-perturbative e A new approach to bosonic boundary string field theory on curved target spaces is developed, which allows to demonstrate techniques to identify closed string excitations in the open string sector. Certain factorisation properties of path integrals over WZW-models are derived, which lead to a adequate re-formulation of boundary string field theory. It is shown for the first time that this setting can reproduce curved D-branes by tachyon condensation starting from flat space as soon as non-local interactions terms are permitted. The results coincide with expectations from conformal field theory. Additionally first steps are taken to study more complex supersymmetric string theories on Calabi-Yau manifolds. This includes an exemplary investigation of coupled open-closed moduli spaces. These results are derived in the framework of topological string theory, which constitutes a projection to a finite subspace of the full theory. The recent formalism of matrix factorisations for describing B-type branes is used in order to show how open string moduli spaces can be constructed exactly. Moreover the influence of closed string perturbations appears in form of an e

• Item Type: Theses (Dissertation, LMU Munich)
• Keywords: String Theory, String Field Theory, Renormalisation Group Flow, Conformal Field Theory, D-branes, Topological Strings, Matrix Factorisations
• Subjects: 500 Natural sciences and mathematics > 530 Physics; 500 Natural sciences and mathematics
• Faculties: Faculty of Physics
• Language: English
• Date of oral examination: 3. December 2007
• 1. Referee: Sachs, Ivo
• Signature of the printed copy: 0001/UMC 17066