On the construction of gauge theories from non critical type 0 strings (Q1817957)

The Polyakov's proposal of constructing Yang-Mills theories by using non critical type 0 strings (a string theory with RR fields and a diagonal GSO projection that removes all fermions from the spectrum while preserving modular invariance at one loop) is investigated. The conformal invariance is broken by putting the system at finite temperature and find that the entropy of the cosmological solutions for these theories matches that of a gas of weakly interacting Yang-Mills bosons, up to a numerical constant. The computation of the entropy using the effective action approach presents some novelties in that the whole contribution comes from the RR fields. Compared with the standard construction, the bare string tension scales differently with the bare coupling, and the fact that in this context one has one less free parameters than in the standard type II/M-theory construction presents a potentially serious problem in taking the continuum limit. An area law and a mass gap in the theory are computed in two different ways and it is shown that such behavior persists for \(p>4\). The possible physical meaning of this result are commented.