RST model

The Russo-Susskind-Thorlacius model or RST model in short is a modification of the CGHS model to take care of conformal anomalies. In the CGHS model, if we include Faddeev-Popov ghosts to gauge-fix diffeomorphisms in the conformal gauge, they contribute an anomaly of -24. Each matter field contributes an anomaly of 1. So, unless N=24, we will have gravitational anomalies. To the CGHS action

$S_{\text{CGHS}}={\frac {1}{2\pi }}\int d^{2}x\,{\sqrt {-g}}\left\{e^{-2\phi }\left[R+4\left(\nabla \phi \right)^{2}+4\lambda ^{2}\right]-\sum _{i=1}^{N}{\frac {1}{2}}\left(\nabla f_{i}\right)^{2}\right\}$, the following term

$S_{\text{RST}}=-{\frac {\kappa }{8\pi }}\int d^{2}x\,{\sqrt {-g}}\left[R{\frac {1}{\nabla ^{2}}}R-2\phi R\right]$

is added, where κ is either $(N-24)/12$ or $N/12$ depending upon whether or not ghosts are considered. The nonlocal term leads to nonlocality. In the conformal gauge,

$S_{\text{RST}}=-{\frac {\kappa }{\pi }}\int dx^{+}\,dx^{-}\left[\partial _{+}\rho \partial _{-}\rho +\phi \partial _{+}\partial _{-}\rho \right]$.

It might appear as if the theory is local in the conformal gauge, but this overlooks the fact that the Raychaudhuri equations are still nonlocal.