Our response to the response hep-th/0608109 by Drummond

TL;DR

This paper responds to Drummond's critique of previous work on effective string actions, clarifying points of agreement and disagreement, and reaffirming the original conclusions about the nonexistence of certain terms.

Contribution

The authors clarify their stance on effective string actions, refuting claims of errors and emphasizing the distinction between classical and quantum equivalence.

Findings

Confirmed non-existence of R^{-4} and R^{-5} terms classically

Maintained the existence of parity violating sector terms

Reaffirmed the nonexistence of order-R^{-3} terms

Abstract

We have carefully examined all the points raised by Drummond in his response hep-th/0608109 to our paper hep-th/0606265 wherein we had made some criticisms of his earlier work hep-th/0411017. We concede that Drummond is correct in claiming the non-existence of R^{-4} and R^{-5} order effective string actions in the parity conserving sector, though only insofar as equivalence of field theories is considered at the classical level; the situation in unclear when quantum equivalence is taken into consideration. We still maintain the existence of such terms in the parity violating sector. Nevertheless we point out that all this has no consequence for our original proof of the nonexistence of order-R^{-3} terms. Apart from this we refute Drummond's claims about our alleged use of field redefinitions as well as his criticism of our dropping R^{-4} terms in our analysis. We reject his contention that our work is merely a partial reconstruction of his original results and that our work contains technical and conceptual errors. We do acknowledge the importance of the absence of terms pointed out by Drummond.