A New Action for Superstring Field Theory

Abstract: Sen's superstring field theory successfully formulates perturbative superstring theory but has a number of unusual features. The action is not background independent and the resulting effective field theory does not appear to have standard diffeomorphsim symmetry - instead there is an exotic gauge symmetry that acts on some fields but not others. A new action is found that reduces to Sen's action in a certain limit and gives the same results as Sen's theory for physical superstring amplitudes. However, the new theory is background independent: there is a shift symmetry so that a change in the background can be compensated for by a corresponding shift in the string fields. Sen's theory has two string fields leading to the physical interacting superstring plus a free superstring that decouples from the physical superstring. The new terms in the action give self-interactions to the second superstring which remains decoupled from the physical superstring. The two superstrings each have a graviton and the effective action for the two gravitons coupled to a background metric is studied and shown to be background independent and diffeomorphism invariant, and the origin of further diffeomorphism-like symmetries is explained.