Related papers: From Quarks to Strings
Ideas about a duality between gauge fields and strings have been around for many decades. During the last ten years, these ideas have taken a much more concrete mathematical form. String descriptions of the strongly coupled dynamics of…
A brief review of the status of duality symmetries in string theory is presented. The evidence is accumulating rapidly that an enormous group of duality symmetries, including perturbative T dualities and non-perturbative S-dualities,…
These notes on string theory are based on a series of talks I gave during my graduate studies. As the talks, this introductory essay is intended for young students and non-string theory physicists.
I discuss the early developments of string theory with respect to its connection with gauge theory and general relativity from my own perspective. The period covered is mainly from 1969 to 1974, during which I became involved in research on…
Invited contribution to the collective book "The Birth of String Theory"
This is a talk given at YKIS '95, primarily to non-string theorists. I review the evidence for string duality, the principle that any string theory at strong coupling looks like another string theory at weak coupling. A postscript…
Over the last few years, string theory has changed profoundly. Most importantly, novel duality relations have emerged which involve gauge theories of brane excitations on one side and various closed string backgrounds on the other. In this…
I review recent progress on the connection between string theory and quantum chromodynamics in the context of the gauge/gravity duality. Emphasis is placed on conciseness and conceptual aspects rather than on technical details. Topics…
String theory is changing the relationship between mathematics and physics. The central role is played by the phenomenon of duality, which is intrinsic to quantum physics and abundant in string theory.
A personal view is given of the development of string theory out of dual models, including the analysis of the structure of the physical states and the proof of the No-Ghost Theorem, the quantization of the relativistic string, and the…
This article surveys some of the highlights in the development of string theory through the first superstring revolution in 1984. The emphasis is on topics in which the author was involved, especially the observation that critical string…
It is shown that the string concept results naturally from considerations of gravitation. This paper describes a derivation of linearized general relativity based upon the hypotheses of special covariance and the existence of a…
This presentation is intended to give a flavour of the physics to be studied and discovered by exploiting the interface between string theory, M-theory and field theory provided by the dynamics of extended objects called `branes', and their…
A few recollections and afterthoughts on the development of the string picture of fundamental interactions out of the S-matrix program.
String theory builds on the great legacy of Yukawa and Tomonaga: New degrees of freedom and control of the UV are two important themes. This talk will give an overview of some of the progress and some of the unsolved problems that…
I review at a non-technical level the use of the gauge-string duality to study aspects of heavy ion collisions, with special emphasis on the trailing string calculation of heavy quark energy loss. I include some brief speculations on how…
In this talk I review recent developments in superstring theory. In the first half of the talk I discuss some of the earlier developments in this subject. This includes a review of the status of string theory as a unified theory of gravity…
It is an old speculation that SU(N) gauge theory can alternatively be formulated as a string theory. Recently this subject has been revived, in the wake of the discovery of D-branes. In particular, it has been argued that at least some…
In these lectures we review the basic ideas of perturbative and non-perturbative string theory. On the non-perturbative side we give an introduction to D-branes and string duality. The elementary concepts of non-BPS branes and…
The first part of this report gives a very quick sketch of how string theory concepts originated and evolved during its first 25 years (1968-93). The second part presents a somewhat more detailed discussion of the highlights of the past…