String Geometry Theory and The String Vacuum

TL;DR

This paper reviews string geometry theory as a non-perturbative approach to string theory, focusing on identifying vacua, deriving perturbative string path-integrals, and finding the string vacuum through potential minimization.

Contribution

It introduces a method to identify perturbative vacua, derive all-order perturbative string path-integrals, and explicitly compute the effective potential for string backgrounds.

Findings

Explicit form of the effective potential for string backgrounds

Identification of the string vacuum as the global minimum of the potential

Introduction of analytical and numerical methods to find the vacuum

Abstract

String geometry theory is a candidate of the non-perturvative formulation of string theory. In this theory, strings constitute not only particles but also the space-time. In this review, we identify perturbative vacua, and derive the path-integrals of all order perturbative strings on the corresponding string backgrounds by considering the fluctuations around the vacua. On the other hand, the most dominant part of the path-integral of string geometry theory is the zeroth order part in the fluctuation of the action, which is obtained by substituting the perturbative vacua to the action. This part is identified with the effective potential of the string backgrounds and obtained explicitly. The global minimum of the potential is the string vacuum. The urgent problem is to find the global minimum. We introduce both analytical and numerical methods to solve it.