TY - JOUR
T1 - Modular invariance, finiteness, and misaligned supersymmetry
T2 - New constraints on the numbers of physical string states
AU - Dienes, Keith R.
N1 - Funding Information:
I am pleased to thank A. Anderson, D. Kutasov, C.S. Lam, R. Myers, D. Spector, H. Tye and E. Witten for fruitful conversations. I also wish to acknowledge the hospitality of the Aspen Center for Physics, where portions of this paper were written. This work was supported in part by NSERC (Canada) and les fonds FCAR (Québec).
PY - 1994/11/7
Y1 - 1994/11/7
N2 - We investigate the genetic distribution of bosonic and fermionic states at all mass levels in non-supersymmetric string theories, and find that a hidden "misaligned supersymmetry" must always appear in the string spectrum. We show that this misaligned supersymmetry is ultimately responsible for the finiteness of string amplitudes in the absence of full spacetime supersymmetry, and therefore the existence of misaligned supersymmetry provides a natural constraint on the degree to which spacetime supersymmetry can be broken in string theory without destroying the finiteness of string amplitudes. Misaligned supersymmetry also explains how the requirements of modular invariance and absence of physical tachyons generically affect the distribution of states throughout the string spectrum, and implicitly furnishes a two-variable generalization of some well-known results in the theory of modular functions.
AB - We investigate the genetic distribution of bosonic and fermionic states at all mass levels in non-supersymmetric string theories, and find that a hidden "misaligned supersymmetry" must always appear in the string spectrum. We show that this misaligned supersymmetry is ultimately responsible for the finiteness of string amplitudes in the absence of full spacetime supersymmetry, and therefore the existence of misaligned supersymmetry provides a natural constraint on the degree to which spacetime supersymmetry can be broken in string theory without destroying the finiteness of string amplitudes. Misaligned supersymmetry also explains how the requirements of modular invariance and absence of physical tachyons generically affect the distribution of states throughout the string spectrum, and implicitly furnishes a two-variable generalization of some well-known results in the theory of modular functions.
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U2 - 10.1016/0550-3213(94)90153-8
DO - 10.1016/0550-3213(94)90153-8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0001444075
SN - 0550-3213
VL - 429
SP - 533
EP - 588
JO - Nuclear Physics, Section B
JF - Nuclear Physics, Section B
IS - 3
ER -