Brst Cohomology and Physical States in 2D Supergravity Coupled to ${\hat c} \leq 1$ Matter

Katsumi Itoh, Nobuyoshi Ohta

Published 1991-10-04, updated 1991-10-25Version 2

We study the BRST cohomology for two-dimensional supergravity coupled to $\hat c \leq 1$ superconformal matter in the conformal gauge. The super-Liouville and superconformal matters are represented by free scalar fields $\phi^L$ and $\phi^M$ and fermions $\psi^L$ and $\psi^M$, respectively, with suitable background charges, and these are coupled in such a way that the BRST charge is nilpotent. The physical states of the full theory are determined for NS and R sectors. It is shown that there are extra states with ghost number $N_{FP}=0,\pm 1$ for discrete momenta other than the degree of freedom corresponding to the ``center of mass", and that these are closely related to the ``null states" in the minimal models with $\hat c<1$.