A pure spinor twistor description of the D = 10 superparticle

We present a novel twistor formulation of the ten-dimensional massless super-particle. This formulation is based on the introduction of pure spinor variables through a field redefinition of another model for the superparticle, and in the new description we find that the super-Pauli-Lubanski three-form naturally arises as a constraint. Quantization is studied in detail for both models and they are shown to correctly describe the D = 10 super-Yang-Mills states.

Palatial twistor theory and the twistor googly problem

A key obstruction to the twistor programme has been its so-called ‘googly problem’, unresolved for nearly 40 years, which asks for a twistor description of right -handed interacting massless fields (positive helicity), using the same twistor conventions that give rise to left -handed fields (negative helicity) in the standard ‘nonlinear graviton’ and Ward constructions. An explicit proposal for resolving this obstruction— palatial twistor theory —is put forward (illustrated in the case of gravitation). This incorporates the concept of a non-commutative holomorphic quantized twistor ‘Heisenberg algebra’, extending the sheaves of holomorphic functions of conventional twistor theory to include the operators of twistor differentiation.

HIDDEN SYMMETRIES OF THE OPEN N=2 STRING

It is known for ten years that self-dual Yang–Mills theory is the effective field theory of the open N=2 string in (2+2)-dimensional space–time. We uncover an infinite set of Abelian rigid string symmetries, corresponding to the symmetries and integrable hierarchy of the self-dual Yang–Mills equations. The twistor description of the latter naturally connects with the BRST approach to string quantization, providing an interpretation of the picture phenomenon in terms of the moduli space of string backgrounds.