Elliptic Genera of Symmetric Products and Second Quantized Strings
R. Dijkgraaf, G. Moore, E. Verlinde, H. Verlinde
Abstract
In this note we prove an identity that equates the elliptic genus partition function of a supersymmetric sigma model on the N-fold symmetric product $M^N/S_N$ of a manifold M to the partition function of a second quantized string theory on the space $M \times S^1$. The generating function of these elliptic genera is shown to be (almost) an automorphic form for O(3,2,Z). In the context of D-brane dynamics, this result gives a precise computation of the free energy of a gas of D-strings inside a higher-dimensional brane.