String Theories on Flat Supermanifolds

Abstract

We construct bosonic string theories, RNS string theories and heterotic string theories on flat supermanifolds. For these string theories, we show cancellations of the central charges and modular invariance. Bosonic string theories on supermanifolds have dimensions (D_B,D_F)=(26,0),(28,2),(30,4),..., where D_B and D_F are the numbers of bosonic coordinates and fermionic coordinates, respectively. We show that in type II string theories the one loop vacuum amplitudes vanish. From this result, we can suggest the existence of supersymmetry on supermanifolds. As examples of the heterotic string theories, we construct those whose massless spectra are related to N=1 supergravity theories and N=1 super Yang-Mills theories with orthosymplectic supergroups on the bosonic flat 10 dimensional Minkowski space. Also, we construct D-branes on supermanifolds and compute tensions of the D-branes. We show that the number of fermionic coordinates contributes to the tensions of the D-branes as an inverse power of the contribution of bosonic coordinates. Moreover, we find some configurations of two D-branes which satisfy the BPS-like no-force conditions if \nu_B - \nu_F = 0,4 and 8, where \nu_B and \nu_F are the numbers of Dirichlet-Neumann directions in the bosonic coordinates and in the fermionic coordinates, respectively.