Killing spinors for the bosonic string

¹ China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics Beijing 100081, China
² Institute for Advanced Study, Shenzhen University - Nanhai Ave 3688, Shenzhen 518060, China
³ School of Physics, Korea Institute for Advanced Study - Seoul 130-722, Korea

Received: 14 December 2011
Accepted: 8 February 2012

Abstract

We obtain the effective action for the bosonic string with arbitrary Yang-Mills fields, up to the α ′ order, in general dimensions. The form of the action is determined by the requirement that the action admit well-defined Killing spinor equations, whose projected integrability conditions give rise to the full set of equations of motion. The success of the construction suggests that the hidden “pseudo-supersymmetry” associated with the Killing spinor equations may be a property of the bosonic string itself.