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The guiding influence of some of Stanley Mandelstam's key contributions to the development of theoretical high energy physics is discussed, from the motivation for the study of the analytic properties of the scattering matrix through to…
It is argued that string theory may pose new conceptual issues for the history and philosophy of science.
Currently, string theory represents the only advanced approach to a unification of all interactions, including gravity. In spite of the more than thirty years of its existence it did not make any empirically testable predictions. And it is…
At the present time, string theory (and its generalizations) remain relatively abstruse subjects to the particle phenomenologist and experimentalist. Yet, striking developments of the last two years offer hope that a fundamental…
In this contribution we go through the developments that in the years 1968 to 1974 led from the Veneziano model to the bosonic string.
The role of integrable systems in string theory is discussed. We remind old examples of the correspondence between stringy partition functions or effective actions and integrable equations, based on effective application of the matrix model…
This is the written version of a short talk given at the University of Leipzig in December 1998. It reviews some general aspects of string theory from the viewpoint of the search for an unifying theory. Here, special emphasis lies on the…
Lenny Susskind has made many important contributions to theoretical physics during the past 35 years. In this talk I will discuss the early history of string theory (1968-72) emphasizing Susskind's contributions.
After a review of some topics concerning the phenomenological applications of perturbative string theory, I discuss to what extent all of it is affected by the recent developements in string dualities.
We define string geometry: spaces of superstrings including the interactions, their topologies, charts, and metrics. Trajectories in asymptotic processes on a space of strings reproduce the right moduli space of the super Riemann surfaces…
If the results of the first LHC run are not betraying us, many decades of particle physics are culminating in a complete and consistent theory for all non-gravitational physics: the Standard Model. But despite this monumental achievement…
String theory is accused by some of its critics to be a purely abstract mathematical discipline, having lost the contact to the simple yet deeply rooted questions which physics provided until the beginning of this century. We argue that, in…
These are the lecture notes of the introductory String Theory course held by one of the authors for the master program of Theoretical Physics at Turin University. The world-sheet approach to String Theory is pedagogically introduced in the…
After briefly reviewing basic concepts of perturbative string theory, we explain in simple terms some of the new findings that created excitement among the string physicists. These developments include non-perturbative dualities and a…
In an effort to promote communication between the formal and phenomenological branches of the high-energy theory community, we provide a description of some important issues in supersymmetric and string phenomenology. We describe each…
Pair creation of strings in time-dependent backgrounds is studied from an effective field theory viewpoint, and some possible cosmological applications are discussed. Simple estimates suggest that excited strings may have played a…
In this note we follow the historical development of the ideas that led to the formulation of String Theory. We start from the inspired guess of Veneziano and its extension to the scattering of $N$ scalar particles, then we describe how the…
This talk considers possible lessons of string theory for low energy physics. These are of two types. First, assuming that string theory is the correct underlying theory of all interactions, we ask whether there are any generic predictions…
This document is an elementary introduction to string diagrams. It takes a computer science perspective: rather than using category theory as a starting point, we build on intuitions from formal language theory, treating string diagrams as…
We give an elementary introduction to classical and quantum bosonic string theory.