A String Theory That Isn't About String
Abstract:
Folklore is that string is an extended object, so it involves infinitely many particle excitations. In this talk, I show that this is not necessarily the case. I consider a novel string theory whose quantization is based upon chirally asymmetric worldsheet vacuum. This results in a theory that involves just a pair of massive gravitons in addition to the massless graviton, two-form field and dilaton. I will show that this novel string theory defines the double field theory at finite string tension, and ambitwistor string theory at infinite string tension. I also compute one-loop partition function, and show that the modular invariance is no longer maintained.