Thirty years of Erice on the brane
Abstract
After initially meeting with fierce resistance, "branes", p-dimensional extended objects which go beyond particles (p=0) and strings (p=1), now occupy centre stage in theoretical physics as microscopic components of M-theory, as the seeds of the AdS/CFT correspondence, as a branch of particle phenomenology, as the higher-dimensional progenitors of black holes and, via the "brane-world", as entire universes in their own right. Notwithstanding this early opposition, Nino Zichichi invited me to to talk about supermembranes and eleven dimensions at the 1987 School on Subnuclear Physics and has continued to keep Erice on the brane ever since. Here I provide a distillation of my Erice brane lectures and some personal recollections.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1812.11658,
title = {Thirty years of Erice on the brane},
author = {M. J. Duff},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.11658},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Published Version 2024. Based on lectures at the International Schools of Subnuclear Physics 1987-2017 and the International Symposium "60 Years of Subnuclear Physics at Bologna", University of Bologna, November 2018. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:hep-th/9611203