Journal of High Energy Physics (Sep 2020)

Torsional Newton Cartan gravity from non-relativistic strings

  • A.D. Gallegos,
  • U. Gürsoy,
  • N. Zinnato

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2020)172
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2020, no. 9
pp. 1 – 36

Abstract

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Abstract We study propagation of closed bosonic strings in torsional Newton-Cartan geometry based on a recently proposed Polyakov type action derived by dimensional reduction of the ordinary bosonic string along a null direction. We generalize the Polyakov action proposal to include matter, i.e. the 2-form and the 1-form that originates from the Kalb- Ramond field and the dilaton. We determine the conditions for Weyl invariance which we express as the beta-function equations on the worldsheet, in analogy with the usual case of strings propagating on a pseudo-Riemannian manifold. The critical dimension of the TNC space-time turns out to be 25. We find that Newton’s law of gravitation follows from the requirement of quantum Weyl invariance in the absence of torsion. Presence of the 1-form requires torsion to be non vanishing. Torsion has interesting consequences, in particular it yields a mass term and an advection term in the generalized Newton’s law. U(1) mass invariance of the theory is an important ingredient in deriving the beta functions.

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