Event Details

The quantization of the bosonic sector of supermembrane theory is considered in double dimensional reduction, in order to extract the dependence of the resulting world-sheet action on the string dilaton (which cannot be obtained from a purely kinematic reduction). The construction relies on a Polyakov-type approach with all six metric components on the world-volume as independent quantum fields, and shows that the correct and unique answer is only obtained if the target-space dimension of the theory is restricted  to the critical value (D=11 for the supermembrane). As a consequence there do not appear to exist membrane analogs of the non-critical string.