SU-ITP-03/05 SLAC-PUB-9713 hep-th/0304169 String Theory on Parallelizable PP-Waves Darius Sadri1,2 and M. M. Sheikh-Jabbari1 1Department of Physics, Stanford University 382 via Pueblo Mall, Stanford CA 94305-4060, USA 2Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford CA 94309, USA
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[email protected] Abstract The most general parallelizable pp-wave backgrounds which are non-dilatonic solutions in the NS-NS sector of type IIA and IIB string theories are considered. We demonstrate that parallelizable pp-wave backgrounds are necessarily homogeneous plane-waves, and that a arXiv:hep-th/0304169v4 11 Jun 2003 large class of homogeneous plane-waves are parallelizable, stating the necessary conditions. Such plane-waves can be classified according to the number of preserved supersymmetries. In type IIA, these include backgrounds preserving 16, 18, 20, 22 and 24 supercharges, while in the IIB case they preserve 16, 20, 24 or 28 supercharges. An intriguing property of paral- lelizable pp-wave backgrounds is that the bosonic part of these solutions are invariant under T-duality, while the number of supercharges might change under T-duality. Due to their α′ exactness, they provide interesting backgrounds for studying string theory. Quantization of string modes, their compactification and behaviour under T-duality are studied. In addition, we consider BPS Dp-branes, and show that these Dp-branes can be classified in terms of the locations of their world volumes with respect to the background H-field. 1 Introduction More than a decade ago it was argued that pp-waves provide us with solutions of supergravity which are α′-exact [1].