On realizing the bosonic string as a noncritical W3-string

We discuss a realization of the bosonic string as a noncritical W3-string. The relevant noncritical W3-string is characterized by a Liouville sector which is restricted to a (nonunitary) (3, 2) W3 minimal model with central charge contribution cl = −2. Furthermore, the matter sector of this W3-string contains 26 free scalars which realize a critical bosonic string. The BRST operator for this W3-string can be written as the sum of two, mutually anticommuting, nilpotent BRST operators: Q = Q0 + Q1 in such a way that the scalars which realize the bosonic string appear only in Q0 while the central charge contribution of the fields present in Q1 equals zero. We argue that, in the simplest case that the Liouville sector is given by the identity operator only, the Q1-cohomology is given by a particular (nonunitary) (3, 2) Virasoro minimal model at c = 0.