The light-cone gauge in Polyakov's theory of strings and its relation to the conformal gauge.
Item
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Title
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The light-cone gauge in Polyakov's theory of strings and its relation to the conformal gauge.
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Identifier
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AAI9009795
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identifier
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9009795
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Creator
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Tzani, Rodanthy.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Bunji Sakita
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Date
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1989
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Physics, Elementary Particles and High Energy
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Abstract
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We study the string theory as a gauge theory. The analysis includes the formulation of the interacting bosonic string by fixing the Gervais-Sakita light-cone gauge in Polyakov's path-integral formulation of the theory and the study of the problem of changing gauge in string theory in the context of the functional formulation of the theory. The main results are the following: Mandelstam's picture is obtained from the light-cone gauge fixed Polyakov's theory. Due to the off-diagonal nature of our gauge the calculation of the determinants differs from the usual (conformal gauge) case. The regularization of the functional integrals associated with these determinants is done by using the conformal-invariance principle. We then show that the conformal anomaly associated with this new gauge fixing is canceled at dimensions of space-time d = 26. Studying the problem of changing gauge in string theory, we show the equivalence between the light-cone and conformal gauge in the path-integral formulation of the theory. In particular, by performing a proper change of variables in the commuting and ghost fields in the Polyakov path-integral, the string theory in the conformal gauge is obtained from the light-cone gauge fixed expression. Finally, the problem of changing gauge is generalized to the higher genus surfaces. It is shown that the string theory in the conformal gauge is equivalent to the light-cone gauge fixed theory for surfaces with arbitrary number of handles.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
