HET-Discovery seminar: Thales Azevedo

Speaker: Thales Azevedo

Title: Connecting the ambitwistor and the sectorized heterotic strings

Abstract: 

Shortly after Mason & Skinner introduced the so-called ambitwistor strings, Berkovits came up with a pure-spinor analogue of the theory, which was later shown to provide the supersymmetric version of the Cachazo-He-Yuan amplitudes. In the heterotic version, however, both models give somewhat unsatisfactory descriptions of the supergravity sector.

In this talk, I will show how the original pure-spinor version of the heterotic ambitwistor string can be modified in a consistent manner that renders the supergravity sector treatable. In addition to the massless states, the spectrum of the new model --- which we call sectorized heterotic string --- contains a single massive level. In the limit in which a dimensionful parameter is taken to infinity, these massive states become the unexpected massless states (e.g. a 3-form potential) first encountered by Mason & Skinner.