Effective action of bosonic string theory at order $$\alpha '^2$$

Abstract

Abstract Recently, it has been shown that the gauge invariance requires the minimum number of independent couplings for B-field, metric and dilaton at order $$\alpha '^2$$α′2 to be 60. In this paper we fix the corresponding 60 parameters in string theory by requiring the couplings to be invariant under the global T-duality transformations. The Riemann cubed terms are exactly the same as the couplings that have been found by the S-matrix calculations.