Bosonic string theory in background fields by canonical methods

Branislav Sazdovic

Published 2003-04-09, updated 2003-06-18Version 2

We investigate classical dynamics of the bosonic string in the background metric, antisymmetric and dilaton fields. We use canonical methods to find Hamiltonian in terms of energy-momentum tensor components. The later are secondary constraints of the theory. Due to the presence of the dilaton field the Virasoro generators have nonlinear realization. We find that, in the curve space-time, opposite chirality currents do not commute. As a consequence of the two-dimensional general covariance, the energy-momentum tensor components satisfy two Virasoro algebras, even in the curve space-time. We obtain new gauge symmetry which acts on both world-sheet and space-time variables, and includes world-sheet Weyl transformation. We emphasize that background antisymmetric and dilaton fields are the origin of space-time torsion and space-time nonmetricity, respectively.