Relation between the Reducibility Structures and between the Master Actions in the Witten Formulation and the Berkovits Formulation of Open Superstring Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between two formulations of open superstring field theory by analyzing their reducibility structures and master actions, revealing that one can be viewed as a regularized version of the other.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of the reducibility structures and master actions in the Witten and Berkovits formulations, extending partial gauge fixing conditions.

Findings

The reducibility structure and master action of the Berkovits formulation are regularized versions of those in the Witten formulation.

Partial gauge fixing allows relating the two formulations at the level of the master action.

The analysis clarifies the gauge and ghost structures in superstring field theories.

Abstract

Developing the analysis in JHEP 03 (2014) 044 [arXiv:1312.1677] by the present authors et al., we clarify the relation between the Witten formulation and the Berkovits formulation of open superstring field theory at the level of the master action, namely the solution to the classical master equation in the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism, which is the key for the path-integral quantization. We first scrutinize the reducibility structure, a detailed gauge structure containing the information about ghost string fields. Then, extending the condition for partial gauge fixing introduced in the above-mentioned paper to the sector of ghost string fields, we investigate the master action. We show that the reducibility structure and the master action under partial gauge fixing of the Berkovits formulation can be regarded as the regularized versions of those in the Witten formulation.