English

String theory integrands and supergravity divergences

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-03-27 v2

Abstract

At low energies, interactions of massless particles in type II strings compactified on a torus TdT^d are described by an effective Wilsonian action S(Λ)\mathcal{S}(\Lambda), consisting of the usual supergravity Lagrangian supplemented by an infinite series of higher-derivative vertices, including the much studied 4p+6qR4\nabla^{4p+6q} \mathcal{R}^4 gravitational interactions. Using recent results on the asymptotics of the integrands governing four-graviton scattering at genus one and two, I determine the Λ\Lambda-dependence of the coefficient of the above interaction, and show that the logarithmic terms appearing in the limit Λ0\Lambda\to 0 are related to UV divergences in supergravity amplitudes, augmented by stringy interactions. This provides a strong consistency check on the expansion of the integrand near the boundaries of moduli space, in particular it elucidates the appearance of odd zeta values in these expansions. I briefly discuss how these logarithms are reflected in non-analytic terms in the low energy expansion of the string scattering amplitude.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.11343,
  title  = {String theory integrands and supergravity divergences},
  author = {Boris Pioline},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.11343},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

40 pages; v2: after fixing a factor of 2 mistake in Eq. (2.41), all divergent terms now agree with SUGRA predictions. Added a note at end of Sec 1 on the definition of the truncated moduli space M_{h,n}(\Lambda)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:53:44.486Z