Superstring Coordinates

[selfAdjoint]

In Cumrun Vafa's "Lightning Introduction" to string theory in his Lectures on Strings and Dualities (http://arxiv.org/hep-th/9702201) , he instroduces supersymmetry to string theory thus:

in addition to the coordinates X^{\mu} we also have anti-commuting fermionic coordinates \psi_{L,R}^{\mu} which are spacetime vectors but fermionic spinors on the worldsheet whose chirality is denoted by subscript L, R.


I have no problem with the anti-commutative coordinates themselve, but how does the worldsheet make vectors in spacetime appear as spinors?

[marcus]

In Cumrun Vafa's "Lightning Introduction" to string theory in his Lectures on Strings and Dualities (http://archive.org/hep-th/9702201) , he instroduces supersymmetry to string theory thus:

in addition to the coordinates X^{\mu} we also have anti-commuting fermionic coordinates \psi_{L,R}^{\mu} which are spacetime vectors but fermionic spinors on the worldsheet whose chirality is denoted by subscript L, R.




I have no problem with the anti-commutative coordinates themselve, but how does the worldsheet make vectors in spacetime appear as spinors?

darnit selfAdjoint, you spelled arxiv wrong so the link does not work :smile:

http://archive.org/hep-th/9702201

make it
http://arxiv.org/hep-th/9702201

[selfAdjoint]

Sorry about that. It's fixed now.