Related papers: Polyakov's String: Twenty Five Years After
The second string revolution, which begin around 1995, has led to a drastic alteration in our perception of the universe, perhaps even more so then did the first string revolution of 1984. That is, extending 10-dimensional string theory to…
Physicists in search of the foundation of the world: how tiny objects can create matter, energy and even space and time - and possibly countless other universes. -- This article is meant as an introduction into quantum geometry (loop…
Two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) has several sources: the search for simple examples of quantum field theory, the description of surface critical phenomena, the study of (super)string vacua. In the present overview of the…
The year 2024 marks two anniversaries: The 70th anniversary of CERN and the 50th anniversary of the $J/\Psi$ discovery. At this occasion I have been asked to give review talks on the significance of these anniversaries. This article is an…
We study the influence of a rotation on the string tension and the temperature of the confinement-deconfinement transition of gluodynamics by gauge/gravity duality. We explore two distinct approaches, global transformation and local…
Superconducting cosmic strings can exhibit longitudinal, pinching instabilities in some regions of the parameter space. We make predictions about the onset of this instability using the thin string approximation (TSA) and develop an…
String theory suggests the existence of a minimum length scale. An exciting quantum mechanical implication of this feature is a modification of the uncertainty principle. In contrast to the conventional approach, this generalised…
We summarize researches - in great deal jointly with my host Y. Sarantopoulos and his PhD. students V. Anagnostopoulos and A. Pappas - started by a Marie Curie fellowship in 2001 and is still continuing. The project was to study…
This is a short account, based on a talk given at the 2024 Moriond Cosmology Conference, of where and why string theory matters in early universe cosmology. It is written for a cosmology audience predisposed to be at best sceptical, and at…
The Poincar\'e sector of a recently deformed conformal algebra is proposed to describe, after the identification of the deformation parameter with the Planck length, the symmetries of a new relativistic theory with two observer-independent…
String theory is the leading candidate for a unified theory of the standard model and gravity. In the last few years theorists have realized that there is a unique structure underlying string theory. In this unification a prominent role is…
We investigate the string configuration that, in the framework of the theoretical scenario introduced in [1], corresponds to the most entropic configuration in the phase space of all the configurations of the universe. This describes a…
We consider two-dimensional quantum gravity coupled to matter in the temporal gauge, using the Polyakov path integral. We show that the integration over the metric can be explicitly performed under some plausible assumptions. We also…
In these lectures I review recent attempts to apply string theory to cosmology, including string cosmology and various models of brane cosmology. In addition, the review includes an introduction to inflation as well as a discussion of…
This is mainly a brief review of some key achievements in a `hot'' area of theoretical and mathematical physics. The principal aim is to outline the basic structures underlying {\em integrable} quantum field theory models with {\em…
A brief review on the progress made in the study of Chern-Simons gauge theory since its relation to knot theory was discovered ten years ago is presented. Emphasis is made on the analysis of the perturbative study of the theory and its…
Solutions to low energy string theory describing black holes and black strings are reviewed. Many of these solutions can be obtained by applying simple solution generating transformations to the Schwarzschild metric. In a few cases, the…
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.
We are celebrating thirty-years from the seminal papers from Weinberg proposing to use the rules of Chiral Perturbation Theory to nucleon systems. His proposal was to build an Effective Field Theory (EFT) with Chiral symmetry as a key…
We give rigorous proofs and generalizations of partial fraction expansions for string amplitudes that were recently discovered by Saha and Sinha.