Two point amplitude for closed superstrings

Abstract: We present a prescription for computing the tree-level two-point amplitude of closed strings in the pure spinor superstring formalism, thereby completing the analysis of such superstring amplitudes. The construction relies on fixing the residual conformal Killing group using a mostly BRST-exact operator that has been successfully applied in the open-string case. Earlier attempts at a straightforward extension to closed strings--treating them naïvely as products of open strings--fail. Nevertheless, we show that a consistent prescription can be obtained by replacing the open-string BRST charge with the closed-string BRST charge. The key idea is to employ closed-string vertex operators with nonstandard ghost-number assignments, rather than the conventional ghost-number (1,1) vertices. Furthermore, since the pure spinor BRST cohomology for closed strings vanishes at total (left plus right) ghost number four or higher, we find that the resulting prescription is essentially unique.