The SO(32) Heterotic and Type IIB Membranes

TL;DR

This paper constructs SO(32) heterotic and Type IIB membranes using anomaly cancellation, revealing their topology as 2D cones in 11D space, and shows how their reduction leads to known string theories.

Contribution

It introduces a novel membrane construction with boundary conditions that shift anomalies, providing a new perspective on string theory origins.

Findings

Membranes have a cone topology in 11D space.

Anomaly shifting via boundary conditions is demonstrated.

Dimensional reduction yields heterotic and Type IIB strings.

Abstract

A two dimensional anomaly cancellation argument is used to construct the SO(32) heterotic and type IIB membranes. By imposing different boundary conditions at the two boundaries of a membrane, we shift all of the two dimensional anomaly to one of the boundaries. The topology of these membranes is that of a 2-dimensional cone propagating in the 11-dimensional target space. Dimensional reduction of these membranes yields the SO(32) heterotic and type IIB strings.