Does string theory violate general covariance?

In a 2007 note on ArXiv, it said:

String theory unifies all interaction but provides a perturbative background dependent formulation which violates general covariance.

However, another 2012 paper on ArXiv said that:

(4.2.1)

Instinctively, one identifies the constraint of the geometry being asymptotically AdS as a background and concludes that AdS/CFT is background dependent by construction. However, it has been argued that the situation is different...

and

...If the AdS/CFT conjecture is true, background independence of string theory could be proven, following this argument.

However, as we know, our universe is not AdS-like, but more similar to dS spacetime. The author also mentioned this in Sec.4.2.2:

The superselection sector of AdS/CFT is not the one we are living in since the cosmological constant was measured to be positive. If there were a duality to string theory in asymptotic de Sitter spacetime, a vacuum solution with positivecosmological constant, this would be a much more realistic model. This is being studied, see for example [7]. Unfortunately, this has not been achieved yet for technical reasons.

Nevertheless, even in an AdS universe, the problem still exists:

The major problem is the lack of an actual proof of the conjecture...Part of the problem is also the AdS part of the duality being ill-defined. String theory can be defined perturbatively, but as argued before this cannot be the fundamental definition, which is still lacking. Attempts to define it with e.g. string field theory have not succeeded yet.

So, does string theory violate general covariance or not? Or we are just still not sure about it?

Thank you.

• Are the preprints published in peer-reviewed journals? – Qmechanic Feb 5 at 12:38
• According to the abstract pages, the first one seems not, and the second one was submitted as essay in philosophy of physics for the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. – pinchun Feb 5 at 16:14
• a quick answer is that the full general covariance (and corresponding background independence) will become manifest after summing over string loops, which is hard. without summing over loops we see the infinitesimal version which corresponds to brst invariance. so yes, string theory is background independent but not manifestly so. – Wakabaloola Feb 5 at 22:53
• Sen proved that closed superstring field theory is background independent in arxiv.org/abs/1711.08468 – Mtheorist Apr 13 at 9:01

Superstring theory has many local symmetries that are not manifest, coming from the BRST charge identifications in the covariant formalism, $$|\psi\rangle\cong|\psi\rangle + Q|\chi\rangle$$. Those symmetries are spontaneously broken by the solution (i.e. the background). Diffeomorphism (i.e. general covariance) is one of those. This is not different the General Relativity, where all the solutions spontaneously breaks the diffeomorphism by fixing a configuration for the metric tensor, which is not an invariant under diffeomorphism. Like any other spontaneously symmetry breaking, the symmetry is still there but the solutions are not invariant under them.