Perturbative world-volume dynamics of the bosonic membrane and string Original Research Article

We study the world-volume theory of a bosonic membrane perturbatively and discuss if one can obtain any conditions on the number of space–time dimensions from the consistency of the theory. We construct an action which is suitable for such a study. In order to study the theory perturbatively we should specify a classical background around which perturbative expansion is defined. We will discuss the conditions which such a background should satisfy to deduce the critical dimension. Unfortunately, we do not know any background satisfying such conditions. In order to get indirect evidences for the critical dimension of the membrane, we next consider two string models obtained via double-dimensional reduction of the membrane. The first one reduces to the Polyakov string theory in the conformal gauge. The second one is described by the Schild action. We show that the critical dimension is 26 for these string theories, which implies that the critical dimension is 27 for the membrane theory.