Events

Date: 12 February 2026   Time: 14:00 - 15:00

Location: Room 610, G.O. Jones Building

Superstring Field Theory

String field theory provides a 2nd quantised non-perturbative formulation of string theory. In this seminar, the field theory for the bosonic string is introduced and the extension to the superstring discussed. Sen's superstring field theory successfully formulates perturbative superstring theory but has a number of strange features. The action is not fully background independent and it does not have standard diffeomorphism symmetry - instead there is an exotic gauge symmetry that acts on some fields but not others. These issues greatly restrict the spacetimes that this action can be applied to. A new action is proposed that reduces to Sen's in a certain limit, but which has diffeomorphism symmetry together with further exotic symmetries and is background independent. As a result, it can be applied to any spacetime.

This talk is based on arxiv:2508.03902.