General fluctuations of the heterotic pure spinor string on curved backgrounds

Abstract

The general fluctuations, in the form of vertex operators, for the heterotic superstring in the pure spinor formalism are considered. The case of a flat background is reviewed and the case of a curved case is studied. The left-moving ghosts are pure spinors and the right-moving ghosts come from fixing the reparametrization invariance. The role of the reparametrization ghosts in the construction of the vertex operators is emphasized.