Spectrum to all orders of Polchinski-Strominger {Effective} String Theory of Polyakov-Liouville Type

Abstract

The spectrum of a Polchinski-Strominger type effective string theory, extended to all orders, herein called an effective string theory of the \emph{Polyakov-Liouville Type} (for obvious reasons) is investigated to all orders in the small parameter $R^{-1}$. Here $R$ is the length of the \emph{closed} string. It is established that to \emph{all orders} the spectrum of this theory is \emph{identical} to that of the free bosonic string theory. While the latter is consistent only in the critical dimension $D_c=26$, the PS- type effective string theories are by construction consistent in \emph{all} dimensions. This work extends earlier results by Drummond, and, by Hari Dass and Matlock to order $R^{-3}$. When combined with Drummond's results about absence of candidate actions at orders $R^{-4},R^{-5}$, our results imply that the spectrum of \emph{all} effective string theories coincides with that of free bosonic string theories to order $R^{-5}$. This agrees with the recent results by Aharony and Karzbrun. Our work is the first all order analysis of any effective string theory.

Comments: 14 pages in JHEP style; minor typos in text and equations corrected in v2