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Can pure-bosonic string theories exist in curved spacetime?

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Question: Can there be a consistent non-supersymmetric pure-bosonic string theory in some curved spacetimes?

Reason: Since fields with certain amount of negative mass can exist in curved spacetime (cf. the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound in AdS) and since avoiding ground-state tachyons of pure-bosonic strings in flat spacetime seems to be the main motivation (besides phenomenological reasons) for superstrings in flat spacetime.

Extending this, are there examples of consistent AdS/CFT dualities involving pure-bosonic fields in the bulk?

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2015-09-05 17:50 (UTC), posted by SE-user crackjack

asked Aug 21, 2015 in Theoretical Physics by crackjack (110 points) [ revision history ]
edited Sep 5, 2015 by Dilaton

Interesting question. For some examples of non-SUSY AdS/CFT examples that rely on the validity of the BF bound, try e.g. arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0105047 - a problem is that the paper is in "SUGRA" only. The critical dimensions aren't imposed in general and the CFTs are only described rather vaguely by some operators and properties.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2015-09-05 17:50 (UTC), posted by SE-user Luboš Motl

commented Aug 21, 2015 by Luboš Motl (10,278 points) [ no revision ]

@LubošMotl That paper seems to be squarely on this. Thanks!! Will look into that.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2015-09-05 17:50 (UTC), posted by SE-user crackjack

commented Aug 21, 2015 by crackjack (110 points) [ no revision ]

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