802 publications from this institution
The GUT-based approach to physics has been attractive since it was first put forward close to thirty years ago; it has been enriched by new ideas, notably supersymmetry and strings; and there are real hints that it is on the right track, notably from measurements of the weak mixing angle and neutrino masses. In this article (based on my Heinrich Hertz lecture at SUSY 2002 at DESY, June, 2002), some of the arguments for grand unification will be reviewed.
The Feynman $i\varepsilon$ is an important ingredient in defining perturbative scattering amplitudes in field theory. Here we describe its analog in string theory. Roughly one takes the string worldsheet to have Lorentz signature when a string is going on-shell although it has Euclidean signature generically.
We revisit some aspects of D-brane theory from the point of view of anomalies. When the boundary condition on a worldsheet boson is flipped from Neumann to Dirichlet, worldsheet supersymmetry requires also reversing the sign of the boundary condition of the corresponding worldsheet fermion. This induces an anomaly which is a mod 2 anomaly in Type II superstring theory and a mod 8 anomaly in Type I superstring theory. The same anomaly also receives contributions from a sign in the sum over bulk spin structures (in Type IIA superstring theory), Chan-Paton factors of symplectic type (in Type I superstring theory), and Majorana fermions that propagate only on the worldsheet boundary. The need to cancel the anomaly accounts for many properties of supersymmetric and especially nonsupersymmetric D-branes in Type I and Type II superstring theory.
These are notes on the theory of supermanifolds and integration on them, aiming to collect results that are useful for a better understanding of superstring perturbation theory in the RNS formalism.
Our basic ideas about physics went through several upheavals early this century. Quantum mechanics taught us that the classical notions of the position and velocity of a particle were only approximations of the truth. With general relativity, spacetime became a dynamical variable, curving in response to mass and energy. Contemporary developments in theoretical physics suggest that another revolution may be in progress, through which a new source of ‘fuzziness’ may enter physics, and spacetime itself may be reinterpreted as an approximate, derived concept (see Fig. 5.1). In this article I survey some of these developments.
This paper summarizes our rather lengthy paper, “Algebra of the Infrared: String Field Theoretic Structures in Massive 𝒩=(2,2) Field Theory In Two Dimensions,” and is meant to be an informal, yet detailed, introduction and summary of that larger work.
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter Facebook Reddit LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Reprints and Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Edward Witten; Flavor Prospects. AIP Conf. Proc. 14 September 2004; 722 (1): 251–254. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1807329 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAIP Publishing PortfolioAIP Conference Proceedings Search Advanced Search |Citation Search
This paper is devoted to a systematic discussion of the supersymmetric index Tr (-1)^ for the minimal supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory -with any simple gauge group G -primarily in four spacetime dimensions.The index has refinements that probe confinement and oblique confinement and the possible spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry and of global symmetries, such as charge conjugation, that are derived from outer automorphisms of the gauge group.Predictions for the index and its refinements are obtained on the basis of standard hypotheses about the infrared behavior of gauge theories.The predictions are confirmed via microscopic calculations which involve a Born-Oppenheimer computation of the spectrum as well as mathematical formulas involving triples of commuting elements of G and the Chern-Simons invariants of flat bundles on the three-torus.
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Modern Classical Physics: Optics, Fluids, Plasmas, Elasticity, Relativity, and Statistical Physics, Kip S. Thorne and Roger D. Blandford, Princeton U. Press, 2017, $125.00 Buy at Amazon
Twenty-five years ago, Michael Green, John Schwarz, and Edward Witten wrote two volumes on string theory. Published during a period of rapid progress in this subject, these volumes were highly influential for a generation of students and researchers. Despite the immense progress that has been made in the field since then, the systematic exposition of the foundations of superstring theory presented in these volumes is just as relevant today as when first published. Volume 2 is concerned with the evaluation of one-loop amplitudes, the study of anomalies and phenomenology. It examines the low energy effective field theory analysis of anomalies, the emergence of the gauge groups E8 x E8 and SO(32) and the four-dimensional physics that arises by compactification of six extra dimensions. Featuring a new Preface setting the work in context in light of recent advances, this book is invaluable for graduate students and researchers in high energy physics and astrophysics, as well as mathematicians.
The article is devoted to a quantum field theory explanation of the relationship (noticed some years ago by Gepner) between the Verlinde algebra of the group $U(k)$ at level $N-k$ and the cohomology of the Grassmannian. The argument proceeds by starting with the two dimensional sigma model whose target space is the Grassmannian and integrating out some fields in a standard way. It has long been known that the resulting low energy effective action describes a theory with a mass gap; the novelty here is that this theory in fact is equivalent at long distances to a gauged WZW model of $U(k)/U(k)$, and hence is related to the Verlinde algebra.
We develop an approach to Khovanov homology of knots via gauge theory (previous physics-based approaches involved other descriptions of the relevant spaces of BPS states). The starting point is a system of D3-branes ending on an NS5-brane with a nonzero theta-angle. On the one hand, this system can be related to a Chern–Simons gauge theory on the boundary of the D3-brane worldvolume; on the other hand, it can be studied by standard techniques of S-duality and T-duality. Combining the two approaches leads to a new and manifestly invariant description of the Jones polynomial of knots, and its generalizations, and to a manifestly invariant description of Khovanov homology, in terms of certain elliptic partial differential equations in four and five dimensions.
Mössbauer spectroscopy and dc magnetization measurements have been used to characterize the low temperature magnetism of a rigorously linear, two-coordinate complex of high-spin Fe(II), Fe[(C(Si(CH3)3]2 (1). The local C-Fe-C chromophore of 1 exhibits novel slow, single-ion paramagnetic relaxation and fully resolved magnetic hyperfine splitting of its zero field Mössbauer spectrum over the range approximately 100 to approximately 50K. The hyperfine field at 4.2 K is 152 T! This is the largest magnetic hyperfine field observed for iron to date regardless of spin, oxidation state, or coordination environment. This observation is attributable to the large unquenched orbital angular momentum corresponding to the degenerate ground (dxy, dx2-y2) orbital pair of 1 in local Dinfinityh symmetry. Maintenance of the ground-state degeneracy is required by the Jahn-Teller theorem leading to the unprecedented result that the magnitude of the magnetic moment of 1's 5Deltag ground state is essentially that of the parent free ion (5D4) ground term.
The GUT-based approach to physics has been attractive since it was first put forward close to thirty years ago; it has been enriched by new ideas, notably supersymmetry and strings; and there are real hints that it is on the right track, notably from measurements of the weak mixing angle and neutrino masses. In this article (based on my Heinrich Hertz lecture at SUSY 2002 at DESY, June, 2002), some of the arguments for grand unification will be reviewed.
Some properties of the anomaly-free O(32) superstring theory recently discovered by Green and Schwarz are discussed. With proper choice of ground state, the theory leads in four dimensions to an SU(5) theory with any desired number of standard generations (and no exotic or mirror fermions). It predicts axions and stable Nielsen–Olesen vortex lines. It can be consistently compactified only if certain topological conditions are imposed.
We analyze global anomalies for elementary Type II strings in the presence of D-branes. Global anomaly cancellation gives a restriction on the D-brane topology. This restriction makes possible the interpretation of D-brane charge as an element of K-theory.
