The Rough with the Smooth of the Light Cone String

TL;DR

This paper investigates the mathematical consistency of operators in the light cone string theory, revealing that certain rough operators conflict with unitarity and the critical dimension, challenging standard assumptions in string quantization.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the rough operator R is incompatible with unitary representations of SO(D-1), questioning the derivation of the critical dimension in light cone string theory.

Findings

Operator R is inconsistent with unitarity on massless states.

The critical dimension D=26 cannot be derived if R is admitted.

Massless multiplets cannot be compatible with a self-adjoint position operator.

Abstract

The polynomials in the generators of a unitary representation of the Poincar\'e group constitute an algebra which maps the dense subspace S of smooth, rapidly decreasing wavefunctions to itself. This mathematical result is highly welcome to physicists, who previously just assumed their algebraic treatment of unbounded operators be justified. The smoothness, however, has the side effect that a rough operator R, which does not map a dense subspace of S to itself, has to be shown to allow for some other dense domain which is mapped to itself both by R and all generators. Otherwise their algebraic product, their concatenation, is not defined. Canonical quantization of the light cone string postulates operators $-i X^1$ and $P^- = (P^0 - P^z)/2$ and as their commutator the multiplicative operator R = P^1/(P^0 + P^z). This is not smooth but rough on the negative z-axis of massless momentum. Using only the commutation relations of P^m with the generators $-i M_iz$ of rotations in the $P^i$-$P^z$-plane we show that on massless states the operator $R$ is inconsistent with a unitary representation of SO(D-1). This makes the algebraic determination of the critical dimension, $D=26$, of the bosonic string meaningless: if the massless states of the light cone string admit R then they do not admit a unitary representation of the subgroup SO(D-1) of the Poincar\'e group. With analogous arguments we show: Massless multiplets are inconsistent with a translation group of the spatial momentum which is generated by a self-adjoint spatial position operator $X$.