References for exact locality in string theory

Question

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Is string theory local?

I was reading some question at physics.se the other day. It was about the nonexistence of a quantum deformation of the diffeomorphism group in string theory. You can look it up for more info. Anyways, the answer was that despite the superficial extended appearance of longitudinal gravitons, the redundant gauge variation of the diffeomorphism group, that's all wrong because it's exactly local. What is the circumstantial evidence for that? Can I see some references, please? Why is there an exact locality?

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This question needs work on its formulation. If you want to refer a question at physics.se, pls link it. Don't expect ppl to search it for you. In the end, it's not clear what exactly you're asking. What's "all wrong"?

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I agree the question is not well-formulated, for example I see no relation between the motivation and the actual question. In addition, the exact question is more or less identical to http://theoreticalphysics.stackexchange.com/questions/234/is-string-theory-local/235#235. I hope Lubos can add his excellent answer there, and the OP can ask their source of information for clarification.

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As always, I'd like to get community input in case I rush to judgement and make a mistake in closing. Questions can always be re-opened, especially if there is a substantial improvement in quality, or in distinguishing the question from previous ones, in this case.

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I am closing this question because it was closed on TP.SE as a duplicate of the mentioned question. Anybody with issues should mention the issues in the reopen vote review queue.  

Answer 1

I think that a good starting point is the paper by Ted Erler and his ex-adviser David Gross

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0406199

and references within, and citations thereof. They write down bosonic open string field theory in such a way that it's manifestly local where the locus reduces to the interaction point.

A warning: this is just open string field theory so there are no gravitons in the manifest spectrum. However gravitons, much like all other closed strings, may be seen as poles in the open strings' scattering amplitudes.

The full theory including the physical gravitons probably can't be made fully local in the same sense because gravitational amplitudes only make sense off-shell, even though this statement could be modified in light-cone gauge, too. There is a problem with closed string field theory if it has to be covariant; but it works in the light cone gauge as well as open string field theory. I am not quite sure why Ted and David only considered open strings.

The explicit construction of theirs clarifies the reason why the high-energy behavior of the open string scattering amplitudes – with the angle scaling in a certain way with energy – saturates the inequality one obtains from locality. This is apparently only the case for perturbative open string theory; the full scattering amplitudes at strong coupling ultimately switch to the black hole regime which implies a faster decrease of the amplitudes with energy.

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