NOVEL STATISTICS FOR STRINGS AND STRING CHERN-SIMON TERMS

We study the statistics of identical strings in R3. Novel possibilities for string statistics are shown to exist at least in the absence of physical inputs such as the possibility of string pair creation. There are for instance strings which do not obey Bose, Fermi or parastatistics. There are also strings which violate the standard spin-statistics relation. The Abelian Chern-Simons Lagrangian which leads to anyons is generalized to strings. It leads to exotic phase changes of wave functions when strings are moved in homotopically nontrivial loops in the N-string configuration space. Non-Abelian generalizations of this Abelian string Lagrangian are also proposed.