Open bosonic strings in general background fields

We discuss the renormalization properties of the 2 dim. field theory describing an open bosonic string in the background fields corresponding to its massless excitations. The relevant β-functions are calculated for gravitational, antisymmetric tensor and Yang-Mills background on 1-loop level, for pure Yang-Mills background an 2-loop level and in the Abelian case up to 3 loops. We find a renormalization scheme dependence starting at 2 loop order. Putting β to zero yields the equation of motion for the non-linear electrodynamics of Fradkin and Tseytlin.