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I summarize some of the ideas and motivations behind a recently performed conformal field theory analysis of closed strings in both geometric and nongeometric three-form flux backgrounds. This suggests an underlying nonassociative structure…
A minimal area problem imposing different length conditions on open and closed curves is shown to define a one parameter family of covariant open-closed quantum string field theories. These interpolate from a recently proposed factorizable…
Conformal sigma models and WZW models on coset superspaces provide important examples of logarithmic conformal field theories. They possess many applications to problems in string and condensed matter theory. We review recent results and…
We continue to investigate properties of the worldsheet conformal field theories (CFTs) which are conjectured to be dual to free large N gauge theories, using the mapping of Feynman diagrams to the worldsheet suggested in hep-th/0504229.…
This is an introduction to the microscopic techniques of non-rational bulk and boundary conformal field theory which are needed to describe strings moving in non-compact curved backgrounds. The latter arise e.g. in the context of…
The geometry of D-branes can be probed by open string scattering. If the background carries a non-vanishing B-field, the world-volume becomes non-commutative. Here we explore the quantization of world-volume geometries in a curved…
We prove several combinatorial results on path algebras over discrete structures related to directed graphs. These results are motivated by Morse theory on a manifold with boundary and, more generally, by Floer theory on a configuration…
We continue the study of a recently proposed solvable irrelevant deformation of an AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$ correspondence that leads in the UV to a theory with Hagedorn spectrum. This can be thought of as a single trace analog of the…
In a previous paper we provided a consistent quantization of open strings ending on D-branes with a background $B$ field. In this letter, we show that the same result can also be obtained using the more traditional method of Dirac's…
This contribution is based on a talk given by the author at the "Dualities and Generalized Geometries" session of the Corfu Summer Institute 2018 workshops. We overview the results of [1], focusing our attention on integrable…
We consider the non-trivial boundary conformal field theory with exactly marginal boundary deformation. In recent years this deformation has been studied in the context of rolling tachyons and S-branes in string theory. Here we study the…
A parametrization of (super) moduli space near the corners corresponding to bosonic or Neveu-Schwarz open string degenerations is introduced for worldsheets of arbitrary topology. With this parametrization, Feynman graph polynomials arise…
We consider the factorization of permutations into bandwidth 1 permutations, which are products of mutually nonadjacent simple transpositions. We exhibit an upper bound on the minimal number of such factors and thus prove a conjecture of…
We propose a world-sheet realization of the zigzag-invariant strings as a perturbed WZNW model at large negative level. We argue that the gravitational dressing produces additional fixed points of the dressed renormalization beta function.…
All unitary Rational Conformal Field Theories (RCFT) are conjectured to be related to unitary coset Conformal Field Theories, i.e., gauged Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) models with compact gauge groups. In this paper we use subfactor theory and…
In this paper automorphic motives are constructed and analyzed with a view toward the understanding of the geometry of compactification manifolds in string theory in terms of the modular structure of the worldsheet theory. The results…
We propose a Lorentz invariant version of Tseytlin's doubled worldsheet theory that makes T-duality covariance of the string manifest. This theory can be derived as a gauge fixed version of Buscher's gauging procedure, in which the…
The boundary conditions of the bosonic string theory in non-zero $B$-field background are equivalent to the second class constraints of a discretized version of the theory. By projecting the original canonical coordinates onto the…
We present an analysis of the canonical structure of the WZW theory with untwisted conformal boundary conditions. The phase space of the boundary theory on a strip is shown to coincide with the phase space of the Chern-Simons theory on a…
We present a conformal field theory -- obtained from a gauged WZW model -- that describes a closed, inhomogeneous expanding and recollapsing universe in $3+1$ dimensions. A possible violation of cosmic censorship is avoided because the…