Extended self-dual Yang-Mills from the N=2 string

We show that the physical degrees of freedom of the critical open string with N = 2 superconformal symmetry on the worldsheet are described by a self-dual Yang-Mills field on a hyperspace parametrised by the coordinates of the target space R-2,R-2 together with a commuting chiral spinor. A prepotential for the self-dual connection in the hyperspace generates the infinite tower of physical fields corresponding to the inequivalent pictures or spinor ghost vacua of this string. An action is presented for this tower, which describes consistent interactions amongst fields of arbitrarily high spin. An interesting truncation to a theory of five fields is seen to have no graphs of two or more loops. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.