The All-Genus String Effective Action

Abstract

We use the off-shell string effective action method developed by E.S. Fradkin and A.A. Tseytlin to obtain the formula for all-genus string effective action with and without compactification at the low-energy approximation in the massless background fields. We find that for the bosonic string, one can determine the dilaton vacuum expectation value from the all-genus effective action because of the nontrivial dependence of potential energy on dilaton. For compactified four-dimensional string models, if one requires that the target-space dilaton field lie on a K\"ahler manifold, we obtain a constraint which will specify the worldsheet dilaton in terms of the constant background fields. We also show that under this constraint, the tree-level k\"ahlar potential and superpotential are not changed by the higher-genus effect. This proves again the non-renormalization theorem for a string moving in massless background fields in the low-energy approximation.