Fermions in bosonic string theories

Abstract

We generalize the Jackiw-Rebbi-Hasenfratz-'t Hooft construction of fermions from bosons to demonstrate the fermionic nature of certain bound states involving SU(N) instantons in even spatial dimensions and SO(N) instantons in 8k+1 spatial dimensions. We use this result to identify several fermionic excitations in various perturbatively bosonic string theories. In some examples we are able to identify these fermions as excitations in known conformal field theories and independently confirm their fermionic nature. Examples of the fermions we find include certain 3-string junctions in type-0B theory, excitations of the 0-p system in type-0A theory, excitations of the stable D-particle of type-0 theory, and a rich spectrum of fermions in the bosonic string compactified on the SO(32) group lattice.