2011/11/24 by Ofer Aharony, Matthew Dodelson · 40 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Action (physics) #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Curvature #Effective action #Gauge (firearms) #Gauge theory #Lorentz covariance #Lorentz transformation #Nambu–Goto action #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #String (physics) #hep-lat #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep02(2012)008
published in Journal of High Energy Physics 2012(2) (Springer Nature) · 15 pages
arxiv created 2011/11/24 · openalex publication_date 2012/02/01 · arxiv updated 2015/06/03 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study the low-energy effective action governing the transverse fluctuations of a long string, such as a confining flux tube in QCD. We work in the static gauge where this action contains only the transverse excitations of the string. The static gauge action is strongly constrained by the requirement that the Lorentz symmetry, that is spontaneously broken by the long string vacuum, is nonlinearly realized on the Nambu-Goldstone bosons. One solution to the constraints (at the classical level) is the Nambu-Goto action, and the general solution contains higher derivative corrections to this. We show that in 2+1 dimensions, the first allowed correction to the Nambu-Goto action is proportional to the squared curvature of the induced metric on the worldsheet. In higher dimensions, there is a more complicated allowed correction that appears at lower order than the curvature squared. We argue that this leading correction is similar to, but not identical to, the one-loop determinant (√(-h) R \Box-1 R) computed by Polyakov for the bosonic fundamental string.