Charged open strings in a background field and Euler-Heisenberg effective action

This talk is based on work made with L. Magnea and R. Russo. We give an explicit expression of the multiloop partition function of open bosonic string theory in the presence of a constant gauge field strength. The Schottky parametrization allows to perform the field theory limit, which at two-loop level reproduces the Euler-Heisenberg effective action for adjoint scalars minimally coupled to the background gauge field.