ON REALIZING THE BOSONIC STRING AS A NONCRITICAL W-3-STRING

We discuss a realization of the bosonic string as a noncritical W-3-st ring. The relevant noncritical W-3-string is characterized by a Liouvi lle sector which is restricted to a (nonunitary) (3, 2) W-3 minimal mo del with central charge contribution c(l) = -2. Furthermore, the matte r sector of this W-3-string contains 26 free scalars which realize a c ritical bosonic string. The BRST operator for this W-3-string can be w ritten as the sum of two, mutually anticommuting, nilpotent BRST opera tors: Q = Q(0) + Q(1) in such a way that the scalars which realize the bosonic string appear only in Q(0) while the central charge contribut ion of the fields present in Q(1) equals zero. We argue that, in the s implest case that the Liouville sector is given by the identity operat or only, the Q(1)-cohomology is given by a particular (nonunitary) (3, 2) Virasoro minimal model at c = 0.