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What happens when you add a forgotten ghost to tensionless string theory?

Sarthak Duary, Sourav Maji

June 3, 2026

Tensionless strings live on a Carrollian spacetime that admits an additional scaling symmetry—one that previous quantizations overlooked. Adding this as a genuine gauge constraint requires a new ghost field (the Carroll-Weyl ghosts), which alters the ghost system from two fields to four and fundamentally changes how anomalies are calculated in this theory.
Published as Path integral quantization of tensionless bosonic strings with Carroll-Weyl ghosts arXiv:2606.04999
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