The effective action on long strings, such as confining strings in pure Yang-Mills theories, is well-approximated by the Nambu-Goto action, but this action cannot be exact. The leading possible corrections to this action (in a long string expansion in the static gauge), allowed by Lorentz invariance, were recently identified, both for closed strings and for open strings. In this paper we compute explicitly in a Hamiltonian formalism the leading corrections to the lowest-lying Nambu-Goto energy levels in both cases, and verify that they are consistent with the previously computed effective string partition functions. For open strings of length R the leading correction is of order 1/R 4 , for excited closed strings of length R in D > 3 space-time dimensions it is of order 1/R 5 , while for the ground state of the closed string in any dimension it is of order 1/R 7 . We attempt to match our closed string corrections to lattice results, but the latter are still mostly outside the range of convergence of the 1/R expansion that we use.

The low-energy effective action on long string-like objects in quantum field theory, such as confining strings, includes the Nambu-Goto action and then higher-derivative corrections. This action is diffeomorphism-invariant, and can be analyzed in various gauges. Polchinski and Strominger suggested a specific way to analyze this effective action in the orthogonal gauge, in which the induced metric on the worldsheet is conformally equivalent to a flat metric. Their suggestion leads to a specific term at the next order beyond the Nambu-Goto action. We compute the leading correction to the Nambu-Goto spectrum using the action that includes this term, and we show that it agrees with the leading correction previously computed in the static gauge. This gives a consistency check for the framework of Polchinski and Strominger, and helps to understand its relation to the theory in the static gauge.Comment: 21 page

Supersymmetry transformations change the Lagrangian L into a total derivative δL = ∂ µ V µ . On manifolds with boundaries the total derivative term is an obstruction to preserving supersymmetry. Such total derivative terms can be canceled by a boundary action without specifying boundary conditions, but only for a subalgebra of supersymmetry. We study compensating boundary actions for N = 1 supersymmetry in 4d, and show that they are determined independently of the details of the theory and of the boundary conditions. Two distinct classes of boundary actions exist, which correspond to preserving either a linear combination of supercharges of opposite chirality (called A-type) or supercharges of opposite chirality independently (B-type). The first option preserves a subalgebra isomorphic to N = 1 in 3d, while the second preserves only a 2d subgroup of the Lorentz symmetry and a subalgebra isomorphic to N = (0, 2) in 2d. These subalgebras are in one to one correspondence with half-BPS objects: the A-type corresponds to domain walls while the B-type corresponds to strings. We show that integrating the full current algebra and taking into account boundary contributions leads to an energy-momentum tensor which contains the boundary terms. The boundary terms come from the domain wall and string currents in the two respective cases.

Field theories with weakly coupled holographic duals, such as large N gauge theories, have a natural separation of their operators into 'single-trace operators' (dual to single-particle states) and 'multi-trace operators' (dual to multi-particle states). There are examples of large N gauge theories where the beta functions of single-trace coupling constants all vanish, but marginal multi-trace coupling constants have non-vanishing beta functions that spoil conformal invariance (even when all multi-trace coupling constants vanish). The holographic dual of such theories should be a classical solution in anti-de Sitter space, in which the boundary conditions that correspond to the multi-trace coupling constants depend on the cutoff scale, in a way that spoils conformal invariance. We argue that this is realized through specific bulk coupling constants that lead to a running of the multi-trace coupling constants. This fills a missing entry in the holographic dictionary.