Personal Recollections of the Early Days Before and After the Birth of Supergravity
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The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity
The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity Cécile DeWitt-Morette The Pursuit of Quantum Gravity Memoirs of Bryce DeWitt from 1946 to 2004 123 Cécile DeWitt-Morette Department of Physics Center for Relativity University of Texas at Austin Austin Texas USA [email protected] ISBN 978-3-642-14269-7 e-ISBN 978-3-642-14270-3 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-14270-3 Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011921724 c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is con- cerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publica- tion or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protec- tive laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Cover design:WMXDesignGmbH,Heidelberg Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Dedicated to our daughters, Nicolette, Jan, Christiane, Abigail Preface This book is written for the curious reader. I hope it will also be a good read for the professional physicist. -
Supergravity and Its Legacy Prelude and the Play
Supergravity and its Legacy Prelude and the Play Sergio FERRARA (CERN – LNF INFN) Celebrating Supegravity at 40 CERN, June 24 2016 S. Ferrara - CERN, 2016 1 Supergravity as carved on the Iconic Wall at the «Simons Center for Geometry and Physics», Stony Brook S. Ferrara - CERN, 2016 2 Prelude S. Ferrara - CERN, 2016 3 In the early 1970s I was a staff member at the Frascati National Laboratories of CNEN (then the National Nuclear Energy Agency), and with my colleagues Aurelio Grillo and Giorgio Parisi we were investigating, under the leadership of Raoul Gatto (later Professor at the University of Geneva) the consequences of the application of “Conformal Invariance” to Quantum Field Theory (QFT), stimulated by the ongoing Experiments at SLAC where an unexpected Bjorken Scaling was observed in inclusive electron- proton Cross sections, which was suggesting a larger space-time symmetry in processes dominated by short distance physics. In parallel with Alexander Polyakov, at the time in the Soviet Union, we formulated in those days Conformal invariant Operator Product Expansions (OPE) and proposed the “Conformal Bootstrap” as a non-perturbative approach to QFT. S. Ferrara - CERN, 2016 4 Conformal Invariance, OPEs and Conformal Bootstrap has become again a fashionable subject in recent times, because of the introduction of efficient new methods to solve the “Bootstrap Equations” (Riccardo Rattazzi, Slava Rychkov, Erik Tonni, Alessandro Vichi), and mostly because of their role in the AdS/CFT correspondence. The latter, pioneered by Juan Maldacena, Edward Witten, Steve Gubser, Igor Klebanov and Polyakov, can be regarded, to some extent, as one of the great legacies of higher dimensional Supergravity. -
Subnuclear Physics: Past, Present and Future
Subnuclear Physics: Past, Present and Future International Symposium 30 October - 2 November 2011 – The purpose of the Symposium is to discuss the origin, the status and the future of the new frontier of Physics, the Subnuclear World, whose first two hints were discovered in the middle of the last century: the so-called “Strange Particles” and the “Resonance #++”. It took more than two decades to understand the real meaning of these two great discoveries: the existence of the Subnuclear World with regularities, spontaneously plus directly broken Symmetries, and totally unexpected phenomena including the existence of a new fundamental force of Nature, called Quantum ChromoDynamics. In order to reach this new frontier of our knowledge, new Laboratories were established all over the world, in Europe, in USA and in the former Soviet Union, with thousands of physicists, engineers and specialists in the most advanced technologies, engaged in the implementation of new experiments of ever increasing complexity. At present the most advanced Laboratory in the world is CERN where experiments are being performed with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful collider in the world, which is able to reach the highest energies possible in this satellite of the Sun, called Earth. Understanding the laws governing the Space-time intervals in the range of 10-17 cm and 10-23 sec will allow our form of living matter endowed with Reason to open new horizons in our knowledge. Antonino Zichichi Participants Prof. Werner Arber H.E. Msgr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo Prof. Guido Altarelli Prof. Ignatios Antoniadis Prof. Robert Aymar Prof. Rinaldo Baldini Ferroli Prof. -
Field Theory Insight from the Ads/CFT Correspondence
Field theory insight from the AdS/CFT correspondence Daniel Z.Freedman1 and Pierre Henry-Labord`ere2 1Department of Mathematics and Center for Theoretical Physics Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 01239 E-mail: [email protected] 2LPT-ENS, 24, rue Lhomond F-75231 Paris cedex 05, France E-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT A survey of ideas, techniques and results from d=5 supergravity for the conformal and mass-perturbed phases of d=4 N =4 Super-Yang-Mills theory. arXiv:hep-th/0011086v2 29 Nov 2000 1 Introduction The AdS/CF T correspondence [1, 20, 11, 12] allows one to calculate quantities of interest in certain d=4 supersymmetric gauge theories using 5 and 10-dimensional supergravity. Mirac- ulously one gets information on a strong coupling limit of the gauge theory– information not otherwise available– from classical supergravity in which calculations are feasible. The prime example of AdS/CF T is the duality between =4 SYM theory and D=10 N Type IIB supergravity. The field theory has the very special property that it is ultraviolet finite and thus conformal invariant. Many years of elegant work on 2-dimensional CF T ′s has taught us that it is useful to consider both the conformal theory and its deformation by relevant operators which changes the long distance behavior and generates a renormalization group flow of the couplings. Analogously, in d=4, one can consider a) the conformal phase of =4 SYM N b) the same theory deformed by adding mass terms to its Lagrangian c) the Coulomb/Higgs phase. -
Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Volume 73
http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/pspum/073 Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics This page intentionally left blank Proceedings of Symposia in PURE MATHEMATICS Volume 73 Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Proceedings of the Conference on Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Dedicated to Dennis Sullivan's 60th birthday June 14-21, 2001 Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York Mikhail Lyubich Leon Takhtajan Editors Proceedings of the conference on Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics held at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, June 14-21, 2001. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 81Txx, 57-XX 18-XX 53Dxx 55-XX 37-XX 17Bxx. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stony Brook Conference on Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (2001 : Stony Brook University) Graphs and Patterns in mathematics and theoretical physics : proceedings of the Stony Brook Conference on Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, June 14-21, 2001, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY / Mikhail Lyubich, Leon Takhtajan, editors. p. cm. — (Proceedings of symposia in pure mathematics ; v. 73) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8218-3666-8 (alk. paper) 1. Graph Theory. 2. Mathematics-Graphic methods. 3. Physics-Graphic methods. 4. Man• ifolds (Mathematics). I. Lyubich, Mikhail, 1959- II. Takhtadzhyan, L. A. (Leon Armenovich) III. Title. IV. Series. QA166.S79 2001 511/.5-dc22 2004062363 Copying and reprinting. Material in this book may be reproduced by any means for edu• cational and scientific purposes without fee or permission with the exception of reproduction by services that collect fees for delivery of documents and provided that the customary acknowledg• ment of the source is given. -
Twenty Years of the Weyl Anomaly
CTP-TAMU-06/93 Twenty Years of the Weyl Anomaly † M. J. Duff ‡ Center for Theoretical Physics Physics Department Texas A & M University College Station, Texas 77843 ABSTRACT In 1973 two Salam prot´eg´es (Derek Capper and the author) discovered that the conformal invariance under Weyl rescalings of the metric tensor 2 gµν(x) Ω (x)gµν (x) displayed by classical massless field systems in interac- tion with→ gravity no longer survives in the quantum theory. Since then these Weyl anomalies have found a variety of applications in black hole physics, cosmology, string theory and statistical mechanics. We give a nostalgic re- view. arXiv:hep-th/9308075v1 16 Aug 1993 CTP/TAMU-06/93 July 1993 †Talk given at the Salamfest, ICTP, Trieste, March 1993. ‡ Research supported in part by NSF Grant PHY-9106593. When all else fails, you can always tell the truth. Abdus Salam 1 Trieste and Oxford Twenty years ago, Derek Capper and I had embarked on our very first post- docs here in Trieste. We were two Salam students fresh from Imperial College filled with ideas about quantizing the gravitational field: a subject which at the time was pursued only by mad dogs and Englishmen. (My thesis title: Problems in the Classical and Quantum Theories of Gravitation was greeted with hoots of derision when I announced it at the Cargese Summer School en route to Trieste. The work originated with a bet between Abdus Salam and Hermann Bondi about whether you could generate the Schwarzschild solution using Feynman diagrams. You can (and I did) but I never found out if Bondi ever paid up.) Inspired by Salam, Capper and I decided to use the recently discovered dimensional regularization1 to calculate corrections to the graviton propaga- tor from closed loops of massless particles: vectors [1] and spinors [2], the former in collaboration with Leopold Halpern. -
Supergravity at 40: Reflections and Perspectives(∗)
RIVISTA DEL NUOVO CIMENTO Vol. 40, N. 6 2017 DOI 10.1393/ncr/i2017-10136-6 ∗ Supergravity at 40: Reflections and perspectives( ) S. Ferrara(1)(2)(3)andA. Sagnotti(4) (1) Theoretical Physics Department, CERN CH - 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland (2) INFN - Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati - Via Enrico Fermi 40 I-00044 Frascati (RM), Italy (3) Department of Physics and Astronomy, Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics U.C.L.A., Los Angeles CA 90095-1547, USA (4) Scuola Normale Superiore e INFN - Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, I-56126 Pisa, Italy received 15 February 2017 Dedicated to John H. Schwarz on the occasion of his 75th birthday Summary. — The fortieth anniversary of the original construction of Supergravity provides an opportunity to combine some reminiscences of its early days with an assessment of its impact on the quest for a quantum theory of gravity. 280 1. Introduction 280 2. The early times 282 3. The golden age 283 4. Supergravity and particle physics 284 5. Supergravity and string theory 286 6. Branes and M-theory 287 7. Supergravity and the AdS/CFT correspondence 288 8. Conclusions and perspectives ∗ ( ) Based in part on the talk delivered by S.F. at the “Special Session of the DISCRETE2016 Symposium and the Leopold Infeld Colloquium”, in Warsaw, on December 1 2016, and on a joint CERN Courier article. c Societ`a Italiana di Fisica 279 280 S. FERRARA and A. SAGNOTTI 1. – Introduction The year 2016 marked the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of Supergravity (SGR) [1], an extension of Einstein’s General Relativity [2] (GR) where Supersymme- try, promoted to a gauge symmetry, accompanies general coordinate transformations. -
Download Report 2010-12
RESEARCH REPORt 2010—2012 MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Cover: Aurora borealis paintings by William Crowder, National Geographic (1947). The International Geophysical Year (1957–8) transformed research on the aurora, one of nature’s most elusive and intensely beautiful phenomena. Aurorae became the center of interest for the big science of powerful rockets, complex satellites and large group efforts to understand the magnetic and charged particle environment of the earth. The auroral visoplot displayed here provided guidance for recording observations in a standardized form, translating the sublime aesthetics of pictorial depictions of aurorae into the mechanical aesthetics of numbers and symbols. Most of the portait photographs were taken by Skúli Sigurdsson RESEARCH REPORT 2010—2012 MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Introduction The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) is made up of three Departments, each administered by a Director, and several Independent Research Groups, each led for five years by an outstanding junior scholar. Since its foundation in 1994 the MPIWG has investigated fundamental questions of the history of knowl- edge from the Neolithic to the present. The focus has been on the history of the natu- ral sciences, but recent projects have also integrated the history of technology and the history of the human sciences into a more panoramic view of the history of knowl- edge. Of central interest is the emergence of basic categories of scientific thinking and practice as well as their transformation over time: examples include experiment, ob- servation, normalcy, space, evidence, biodiversity or force. -
Einstein's Equations for Spin 2 Mass 0 from Noether's Converse Hilbertian
Einstein’s Equations for Spin 2 Mass 0 from Noether’s Converse Hilbertian Assertion October 4, 2016 J. Brian Pitts Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge [email protected] forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics Abstract An overlap between the general relativist and particle physicist views of Einstein gravity is uncovered. Noether’s 1918 paper developed Hilbert’s and Klein’s reflections on the conservation laws. Energy-momentum is just a term proportional to the field equations and a “curl” term with identically zero divergence. Noether proved a converse “Hilbertian assertion”: such “improper” conservation laws imply a generally covariant action. Later and independently, particle physicists derived the nonlinear Einstein equations as- suming the absence of negative-energy degrees of freedom (“ghosts”) for stability, along with universal coupling: all energy-momentum including gravity’s serves as a source for gravity. Those assumptions (all but) imply (for 0 graviton mass) that the energy-momentum is only a term proportional to the field equations and a symmetric curl, which implies the coalescence of the flat background geometry and the gravitational potential into an effective curved geometry. The flat metric, though useful in Rosenfeld’s stress-energy definition, disappears from the field equations. Thus the particle physics derivation uses a reinvented Noetherian converse Hilbertian assertion in Rosenfeld-tinged form. The Rosenfeld stress-energy is identically the canonical stress-energy plus a Belinfante curl and terms proportional to the field equations, so the flat metric is only a convenient mathematical trick without ontological commitment. Neither generalized relativity of motion, nor the identity of gravity and inertia, nor substantive general covariance is assumed. -
Guest Editorial: Truth, Beauty, and Supergravity Stanley Deser
Guest Editorial: Truth, beauty, and supergravity Stanley Deser Citation: American Journal of Physics 85, 809 (2017); doi: 10.1119/1.4994807 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.4994807 View Table of Contents: http://aapt.scitation.org/toc/ajp/85/11 Published by the American Association of Physics Teachers Articles you may be interested in Entanglement isn't just for spin American Journal of Physics 85, 812 (2017); 10.1119/1.5003808 Three new roads to the Planck scale American Journal of Physics 85, 865 (2017); 10.1119/1.4994804 A demonstration of decoherence for beginners American Journal of Physics 85, 870 (2017); 10.1119/1.5005526 The geometry of relativity American Journal of Physics 85, 683 (2017); 10.1119/1.4997027 The gravitational self-interaction of the Earth's tidal bulge American Journal of Physics 85, 663 (2017); 10.1119/1.4985124 John Stewart Bell and Twentieth-Century Physics: Vision and Integrity American Journal of Physics 85, 880 (2017); 10.1119/1.4983117 GUEST EDITORIAL Guest Editorial: Truth, beauty, and supergravity (Received 9 June 2017; accepted 28 June 2017) [http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.4994807] I begin with a warning: theoretical physics is an edifice Dirac equation governing the behavior of electrons—as well built over the centuries by some of mankind’s greatest minds, as all the other leptons and quarks, hence also our protons using ever more complicated and sophisticated concepts and and neutrons. Indeed, it is perhaps one of our three most mathematics to cover phenomena on scales billions of times beautiful equations, along with Maxwell’s and Einstein’s! It removed—in directions both bigger and smaller—from our came full-blown from the head of one of the true greats of human dimensions, where our simple intuition or primitive the last century, and instantly divided all particles into two language cannot pretend to have any validity. -
Adobe Acrobat PDF Document
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH of HUGH EVERETT, III. Eugene Shikhovtsev ul. Dzerjinskogo 11-16, Kostroma, 156005, Russia [email protected] ©2003 Eugene B. Shikhovtsev and Kenneth W. Ford. All rights reserved. Sources used for this biographical sketch include papers of Hugh Everett, III stored in the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics; Graduate Alumni Files in Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; personal correspondence of the author; and information found on the Internet. The author is deeply indebted to Kenneth Ford for great assistance in polishing (often rewriting!) the English and for valuable editorial remarks and additions. If you want to get an interesting perspective do not think of Hugh as a traditional 20th century physicist but more of a Renaissance man with interests and skills in many different areas. He was smart and lots of things interested him and he brought the same general conceptual methodology to solve them. The subject matter was not so important as the solution ideas. Donald Reisler [1] Someone once noted that Hugh Everett should have been declared a “national resource,” and given all the time and resources he needed to develop new theories. Joseph George Caldwell [1a] This material may be freely used for personal or educational purposes provided acknowledgement is given to Eugene B. Shikhovtsev, author ([email protected]), and Kenneth W. Ford, editor ([email protected]). To request permission for other uses, contact the author or editor. CONTENTS 1 Family and Childhood Einstein letter (1943) Catholic University of America in Washington (1950-1953). Chemical engineering. Princeton University (1953-1956). -
Conceptual Issues in Quantum Cosmology
Conceptual Issues in Quantum Cosmology Claus Kiefer Institut fur¨ Theoretische Physik Universitat¨ zu Koln¨ ½ Contents Why quantum cosmology? Boundary conditions Decoherence in quantum cosmology Direction of time Why Quantum Cosmology? Gell-Mann and Hartle 1990: Quantum mechanics is best and most fundamentally understood in the framework of quantum cosmology. I Quantum theory is universally valid: Application to the Universe as a whole as the only closed quantum system in the strict sense I Need quantum theory of gravity, since gravity dominates on large scales Georges Lemaˆıtre 1931: If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning . If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time. Main approaches to quantum gravity No question about quantum gravity is more difficult than the question, “What is the question?” (John Wheeler 1984) I Quantum general relativity I Covariant approaches (perturbation theory, path integrals including spin foams, asymptotic safety, . ) I Canonical approaches (geometrodynamics, connection dynamics, loop dynamics, . ) I String theory I Fundamental discrete approaches (quantum topology, causal sets, group field theory, . ); have partially grown out of the other approaches See e.g. C. Kiefer, Quantum Gravity, 3rd edition, Oxford 2012. Quantum geometrodynamics (a) John Archibald Wheeler (b) Bryce DeWitt Application of Schrodinger’s¨ procedure to general relativity leads