TOROIDAL COMPACTIFICATION AND SYMMETRY-BREAKING IN OPEN-STRING THEORIES

In toroidal compactifications of open-string theories, the background fields of the "parent" closed string (metric and antisymmetric tensor, with suitable restrictions) are accompanied by open-string Wilson lines. In the SO(32) superstring, these control the breaking of the Chan-Paton symmetry in a way that presents interesting analogies with the corresponding phenomenon in the heterotic string. An extension of the closed-string results to include contributions from the disk and the projective plane shows that these fields are genuine "moduli", since their amplitudes vanish when the momenta are all scaled to zero.