Modifying the bosonic string vacuum

A nontrivial string vacuum can induce effects in open bosonic string theories which can be interpreted in terms of nonlocality of the mapping of the string world sheet into spacetime. This is achieved by modifying the sum over Riemann surfaces to include boundaries on which the bosonic fields satisfy a Dirichlet condition, as well as holes with the usual Neumann condition and crosscaps. Such effects profoundly alter the large-angle behaviour of string amplitudes. With suitable normalization, they also lead to a cancellation of the one-loop divergence associated with the vacuum emission of a soft dilaton.