Pith Number

pith:SAYH4IKN

pith:2026:SAYH4IKN554WHBSY5C4T7OJTDU

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

On the Consistency of Null Strings Literature: The Tale of an Overlooked Symmetry

H. Yavartanoo, M. M. Sheikh-Jabbari

Null strings have an overlooked local symmetry that cuts their physical propagating degrees of freedom to D-3 instead of D-2.

arxiv:2605.12414 v2 · 2026-05-12 · hep-th

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{SAYH4IKN554WHBSY5C4T7OJTDU}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

By correctly accounting for this symmetry, we show that the number of physical propagating degrees of freedom of null strings in D dimensional target space is D-3, in contrast to D-2 that one finds in the literature.

C2weakest assumption

That the newly identified local symmetry is independent of previously known gauge symmetries, must be accounted for in the standard way when counting physical degrees of freedom, and was genuinely overlooked rather than already implicit in the literature.

C3one line summary

Null strings possess an overlooked local symmetry that reduces their physical degrees of freedom to D-3 rather than the D-2 reported in prior literature.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-29T01:05:12.375556Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

90307e214def79638658e8b93fb9331d31d8a3cb23ff03e3cc07676ceacc9436

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.12414 · arxiv_version: 2605.12414v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.12414 · pith_short_12: SAYH4IKN554W · pith_short_16: SAYH4IKN554WHBSY · pith_short_8: SAYH4IKN

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/SAYH4IKN554WHBSY5C4T7OJTDU \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 90307e214def79638658e8b93fb9331d31d8a3cb23ff03e3cc07676ceacc9436

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "c4269457a6d5dafffee2d9310c525fe72c6005347356d747fc075c3944936474",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "hep-th",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-12T17:11:44Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "b342040a49c601e8e4073f5fc9f65fb2b8aa25aa9da9419d28030a793b0bbe7f"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.12414",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}