Type IIB superstring vertex operator from the -8 picture

Abstract

A new procedure was recently proposed for constructing massless Type IIB vertex operators in the pure spinor formalism. Instead of expressing these closed string vertex operators as left-right products of open string vertex operators, they were instead constructed from the complex N=2 d=10 superfield whose lowest real and imaginary components are the dilaton and Ramond-Ramond axion. These Type IIB vertex operators take a simple form in the -8 picture and are related to the usual vertex operators in the zero picture by acting with picture-raising operators. In this paper, we compute explicitly this picture-raising procedure and confirm this proposal in a flat background. Work is in progress on confirming this proposal in an $AdS_5\times S^5$ background.