Off-shell Closed String Amplitudes: Towards a Computation of the Tachyon Potential

TL;DR

This paper develops explicit formulas for off-shell closed string amplitudes, enabling detailed computation of the tachyon potential and revealing its geometric invariance properties related to Strebel differentials.

Contribution

It introduces a novel explicit formula for off-shell closed string actions and amplitudes, linking the tachyon potential to geometrical invariants of Strebel quadratic differentials.

Findings

The tachyon potential coefficients are geometrical invariants.

Closed string polyhedra minimize the tachyon potential order by order.

The formulae facilitate off-shell amplitude calculations on Riemann surfaces.

Abstract

We derive an explicit formula for the evaluation of the classical closed string action for any off-shell string field, and for the calculation of arbitrary off-shell amplitudes. The formulae require a parametrization, in terms of some moduli space coordinates, of the family of local coordinates needed to insert the off-shell states on Riemann surfaces. We discuss in detail the evaluation of the tachyon potential as a power series in the tachyon field. The expansion coefficients in this series are shown to be geometrical invariants of Strebel quadratic differentials whose variational properties imply that closed string polyhedra, among all possible choices of string vertices, yield a tachyon potential which is as small as possible order by order in the string coupling constant. Our discussion emphasizes the geometrical meaning of off-shell amplitudes.