From QCD Strings to WZW
John Donahue (Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, Department of Physics, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, U.S.A.); Sergei Dubovsky (Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, Department of Physics, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, U.S.A.); Guzmán Hernández-Chifflet (Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, Department of Physics, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, U.S.A., Instituto de Física, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, 11300, Uruguay); Sergey Monin (William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, U.S.A.)
According to the Axionic String Ansatz (ASA) confining flux tubes in pure gluodynamics are in the same equivalence class as a new family of integrable non-critical strings, called axionic strings. In addition to translational modes, axionic strings carry a set of worldsheet axions transforming as an antisymmetric tensor under the group of transverse rotations. We initiate a study of integrable axionic strings at general number of space-time dimensions D. We show that in the infinite tension limit worldsheet axions should be described by a peculiar “pseudofree” theory — their S-matrix is trivial, but the corresponding action cannot be brought into a free form by a local field redefinition. This requirement fixes the axionic action to take a form of the O(D − 2) Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) model.
