Natural Generalization of Bosonic String Amplitudes

Abstract

The similarity between tree-level string theory scalar amplitudes, the Koba-Nielsen form ($S^{1}$) and the Virasoro-Shapiro form ($S^{2}$) suggests a natural $S^{n}$ generalization for a scalar amplitude. It is shown that the $S^{n}$ amplitude shares many essential properties of the string theory amplitudes, including $SO(n+1,1)$ conformal symmetry and linear Regge trajectories for the mass spectrum. We also discuss factorization and the critical dimension for the amplitude, which are the necessary conditions for the quantum mechanical consistency (unitarity) of the amplitude.