Department of Physics Papers
Document Type
Conference Paper
Date of this Version
1987
Publication Source
Proceedings of the Salt Lake City Meeting
Start Page
396
Last Page
404
Abstract
This talk describes some work done jointly with L. Alvarez-Gaume, J.B. Bost, G. Moore, and C. Vafa [1][2], building on [3] and [4).
We were concerned with establishing bosonization results on two-dimensional surfaces with complicated topology. Far from being a mere curiosity, bosonization is of great interest in string theory. For example, bosonization has been used in light-cone gauge to prove the equivalence of the Green-Schwarz and NSR superstring [5][6]. Bosonization also plays a key role in understanding the gauge and super-symmetry of the heterotic string [7] and in formulating the covariant fermion emission vertex [8][9].
The papers [1], [2] generalize existing results on Fermi-Bose equivalence for Fermi fields of any spin on the sphere [10]-[13]. In this talk I will only discuss a subproblem, that of bosonizing spin 1/2 on the torus. It turns out that this problem is only slightly more difficult than the sphere case. One needs a way to "tell" the bosonic theory which of the various spin structures it is to mimic; this is accomplished by adding to the bosonic action a new global term. The new term is already familiar to mathematicians as the parity of a spin structure; it has an immediate generalization to any genus surface.
Copyright/Permission Statement
Electronic version of an article published as [Proceedings of the Salt Lake City Meeting, 1-9 © [copyright World Scientific Publishing Company]
Recommended Citation
Nelson, P. C. (1987). A New Topological Term in 2d Field Theory. Proceedings of the Salt Lake City Meeting, 396-404. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/physics_papers/560
Date Posted: 01 May 2017
Comments
At the time of publication, author Philip C. Nelson was affiliated with Harvard University. Currently, he is a faculty member in the Physics & Astronomy Department at the University of Pennsylvania.