Dilaton coupling and BRST quantization of bosonic strings

Abstract

BRST quantization of the bosonic string on a flat world sheet in an arbitrary background field is discussed. It is shown that by demanding the nilpotence of the BRST charge we may obtain the equations of motion of all the massless fields in the theory, provided we couple the dilaton field to the divergence of the ghost number current in the α-model. © 1986.