The Berkovits-Vafa Construction and Nonlinear Realizations

Abstract

Berkovits and Vafa recently showed that critical string theories can be considered as critical superstring theories with a special choice of background. The embedding of the Virasoro algebra into the super-Virasoro algebra involved in this construction has been extended to the noncritical case by Berkovits and Ohta. It is shown that the resulting nonlinear realization of the super-Virasoro algebra can be interpreted using standard techniques from the theory of nonlinear realizations. This extends earlier work of Kunitomo.