Related papers: David Olive: his life and work
In 1985, physicists Dixon, Harvey, Vafa and Witten studied string theories on Calabi-Yau orbifolds (cf. [DHVW]). An interesting discovery in their paper was the prediction that a certain physicist's Euler number of the orbifold must be…
The AdS/CFT correspondence of elementary string theory has been recently suggested as a ``microscopic'' approach to QCD string theory in various dimensions. We use the microscopic theory to show that the ultraviolet regime on the string…
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…
The gauge/gravity duality conjecture claims the equivalence between gauge theory and superstring/M-theory. In particular, the one-dimensional gauge theory of D0-branes and type IIA string theory should agree on properties of hot black…
We discuss the continuum field theory limit of the physical scenario described in Ref. [1], the universe arising from the interpretation of the most general collection of logical codes in terms of distributions of units of energy along…
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.
The first quantum string theories were developed around 1970, prior to the discovery of QCD, with the goal of producing a theory of hadrons. Basic physical requirements and mathematical consistency of the string theories known at that time…
Recently, string theory on Calabi--Yau manifolds was constructed and was shown to be a fully consistent, space--time supersymmetric string theory. The physically interesting case is the case of three generations. Intriguingly, it appears at…
We present the low-energy effective theory on long strings in quantum field theory, including a streamlined review of previous literature on the subject. Such long strings can appear in the form of solitonic strings, as in the 4d Abelian…
Duality symmetries in supergravity theories, together with their implications for string theory, are reviewed.
String theory is at the moment the only advanced approach to a unification of all interactions, including gravity. But, in spite of the more than thirty years of its existence, it does not make any empirically testable predictions, and it…
The heterotic string theory, compactified to four dimensions, has been conjectured to have a duality symmetry (S duality) that transforms the dilaton nonlinearly. If valid, this symmetry could provide an important means of obtaining…
We consider string theory in a time dependent orbifold with a null singularity. The singularity separates a contracting universe from an expanding universe, thus constituting a big crunch followed by a big bang. We quantize the theory both…
The strong coupling dynamics of string theories in dimension $d\geq 4$ are studied. It is argued, among other things, that eleven-dimensional supergravity arises as a low energy limit of the ten-dimensional Type IIA superstring, and that a…
String theory developed by demanding consistency with quantum mechanics. In this paper we wish to reverse the reasoning. We pretend open string field theory is a fully consistent definition of the theory - it is at least a self consistent…
String theory on D-brane backgrounds is open-closed string theory. Given the relevance of this fact, we give details and elaborate upon our earlier construction of oriented open-closed string field theory. In order to incorporate explicitly…
A fundamental task for the heterotic superstring theory is the determination of the effective action describing the physics of massless string excitations at low energies. This is necessary for the phenomenological applications of string…
We have proposed a new type of string field theory. The main point of the present article is to cure some technical troubles: missing two out three terms in veneziano amplitude. Our novel string field theory, describes a theory with many…
In six dimensions, cancellation of gauge, gravitational, and mixed anomalies strongly constrains the set of quantum field theories which can be coupled consistently to gravity. We show that for some classes of six-dimensional supersymmetric…
In earlier work we proposed a string theory dual to two dimensional Yang-Mills theory at zero coupling (which can also be thought of as a $BF$ theory), given by a Polyakov-like generalization of Ho\v rava's topological rigid string theory,…