Super Yang-Mills α′ corrections in D = 10 from the pure spinor formalism

Abstract

In this thesis we aim to utilise the powerful machinery, developed in the past decade, to calculate D = 10 Super Yang-Mills amplitudes in the pure spinor formalism and apply it to find α′ corrections to Super Yang-Mills via an alternative cohomology-driven method. We begin by presenting a brief review of the Ramond-Neveu-Schwarz String and the Green-Schwarz String, discussing some of the issues when quantising such theories. We then move on to the current state-of-the-art methods, as well as a brief overview of the advantages of pure spinor. We then discuss how we determine higher-order corrections to Super Yang-Mills using BRST cohomology arguments and ansatzes. This involves using the simplicity of the BRST operator in pure spinor superspace to efficiently find generating series expressions which give rise to the n−point amplitudes corresponding to the corrections. In order to perform these calculations we derive a number of new identities relating higher mass non-linear fields to lower mass fields which facilitates the canonicalisation of ansatz variations. We also introduce a number of new higher mass fields and determine their variations and other identities that may be useful in future research. Furthermore, some simple calculations for the torodial compactification of the pure spinor method in D = 4 are presented - showing that the resulting spectrum replicates the expected spectrum. There are also some additional topics which cover experimental calculations aimed at simplifying some of the results presented within this thesis - however many of these experiments have failed to produce novel results and are presented here for posterity.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Callum Lee Hunter: orcid.org/0000-0002-1600-1812

ORCID for Carlos Mafra: orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9654

ORCID for Kostas Skenderis: orcid.org/0000-0003-4509-5472

Catalogue record

Export record