String Theory - from Physics to Metaphysics1
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M2-Branes Ending on M5-Branes
M2-branes ending on M5-branes Vasilis Niarchos Crete Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Crete 7th Crete Regional Meeting on String Theory, 27/06/2013 based on recent work with K. Siampos 1302.0854, ``The black M2-M5 ring intersection spins’‘ Proceedings Corfu Summer School, 2012 1206.2935, ``Entropy of the self-dual string soliton’’, JHEP 1207 (2012) 134 1205.1535, ``M2-M5 blackfold funnels’’, JHEP 1206 (2012) 175 and older work with R. Emparan, T. Harmark and N. A. Obers ➣ blackfold theory 1106.4428, ``Blackfolds in Supergravity and String Theory’’, JHEP 1108 (2011) 154 0912.2352, ``New Horizons for Black Holes and Branes’’, JHEP 1004 (2010) 046 0910.1601, ``Essentials of Blackfold Dynamics’’, JHEP 1003 (2010) 063 0902.0427, ``World-Volume Effective Theory for Higher-Dimensional Black Holes’’, PRL 102 (2009)191301 0708.2181, ``The Phase Structure of Higher-Dimensional Black Rings and Black Holes’‘ + M.J. Rodriguez JHEP 0710 (2007) 110 2 Important lessons about the fundamentals of string/M-theory (and QFT) are obtained by studying the low-energy theories on D-branes and M-branes. Most notably in M-theory, recent progress has clarified the low-energy QFT on N M2-brane and the N3/2 dof that it exhibits. Bagger-Lambert ’06, Gustavsson ’07, ABJM ’08 Drukker-Marino-Putrov ’10 Our understanding of the M5-brane theory is more rudimentary, but efforts to identify analogous properties, e.g. the N3 scaling of the massless dof, is underway. Douglas ’10 Lambert,Papageorgakis,Schmidt-Sommerfeld ’10 Hosomichi-Seong-Terashima ’12 Kim-Kim ’12 Kallen-Minahan-Nedelin-Zabzine ’12 .. -
A String Landscape Perspective on Naturalness Outline • Preliminaries
A String Landscape Perspective on Naturalness A. Hebecker (Heidelberg) Outline • Preliminaries (I): The problem(s) and the multiverse `solution' • Preliminaries (II): From field theory to quantum gravity (String theory in 10 dimensions) • Compactifications to 4 dimensions • The (flux-) landscape • Eternal inflation, multiverse, measure problem The two hierarchy/naturalness problems • A much simplified basic lagrangian is 2 2 2 2 4 L ∼ MP R − Λ − jDHj + mhjHj − λjHj : • Assuming some simple theory with O(1) fundamental parameters at the scale E ∼ MP , we generically expectΛ and mH of that order. • For simplicity and because it is experimentally better established, I will focus in on theΛ-problem. (But almost all that follows applies to both problems!) The multiverse `solution' • It is quite possible that in the true quantum gravity theory, Λ comes out tiny as a result of an accidental cancellation. • But, we perceive that us unlikely. • By contrast, if we knew there were 10120 valid quantum gravity theories, we would be quite happy assuming that one of them has smallΛ. (As long as the calculations giving Λ are sufficiently involved to argue for Gaussian statisics of the results.) • Even better (since in principle testable): We could have one theory with 10120 solutions with differentΛ. Λ-values ! The multiverse `solution' (continued) • This `generic multiverse logic' has been advertised long before any supporting evidence from string theory existed. This goes back at least to the 80's and involves many famous names: Barrow/Tipler , Tegmark , Hawking , Hartle , Coleman , Weinberg .... • Envoking the `Anthropic Principle', [the selection of universes by demanding features which we think are necessary for intelligent life and hence for observers] it is then even possible to predict certain observables. -
The Metaphysical Baggage of Physics Lee Smolin Argues That Life Is More
The Metaphysical Baggage of Physics Lee Smolin argues that life is more fundamental than physical laws. BY MICHAEL SEGAL ILLUSTRATION BY LOUISA BERTMAN JANUARY 30, 2014 An issue on tme would not be complete without a conversaton with Lee Smolin. High school dropout, theoretcal physicist, and founding member of the Perimeter Insttute for Theoretcal Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin’s life and work refect many of the values of this magazine. Constantly probing the edges of physics, he has also pushed beyond them, into economics and the philosophy of science, and into popular writng. Not one to shy away from a confrontaton, his 2008 bookThe Trouble with Physicstook aim at string theory, calling one of the hotest developments in theoretcal physics of the past 50 years a dead end. In his thinking on tme too, he has taken a diferent tack from the mainstream, arguing that the fow of tme is not just real, but more fundamental than physical law. He spoke to me on the phone from his home in Toronto. How long have you been thinking about tme? The whole story starts back in the ’80s when I was puzzling over the failure of string theory to uniquely tell us the principles that determine what the laws of physics are. I challenged myself to invent a way that nature might select what the laws of physics turned out to be. I invented a hypothesis called Cosmological Natural Selecton, which was testable, which made explicit predictons. This wasn’t my main day job; my main day job was working on quantum gravity where it’s assumed that tme is unreal, that tme is an illusion, and I was working, like anybody else, on the assumpton that tme is an illusion for most of my career. -
Riemann Surfaces, Conformal Fields and Strings I. FIELD THEORY and RIEMANN SURFACES the Space-Time on Which the Particl Physicis
Riemann Surfaces, Conformal Fields and Strings I he ru k uf Rtc m:rnn s url acc~ in modern pa rticle r h y~ i cs I\ discussed. M<i thc111at- 1r :1!1 \. q11 :1111urn ri cld th eories c:1 11 he tlclinccl 011 the" : mani fo lds if the <1rc co11 - lmm11lll' in ari 11 n1. I hysic•tll y. Ri 1:t11 nnn surl:i tcs provide n 111 od1: I for th • wqrlJ , h~ c l ~ 'vc p t out IJ n prop:1gating rcla1i vistk stri ng. Thuh Ricmu nn surl uccs nrc th e natural se ll ing for confom1al fiel d theory. and. both these co n cc pl ~ together pruvidc .1 1i1r11tul .1 t1 011 of smng theory. I\~\ Words: string theory, conformal symmetry , 11•orld sh eets, Riemann surfaces I. FIELD THEORY AND RIEMANN SURFACES The space- tim e on whi ch th e particl ph ysici st writes a Lagrnngian field theory and deduces equations ol moiion, c b ss i c~ d solutions anJ quantum scaucring amplitud s is usually taken to be a Ri e nian111a11 manifold . 1 T he. ii.l ea is cent rn l l ' ge neral relati vi ty and grav1tat1 n.2 and has becom · mor imporlanl in pnrticlc phys ics w11h increasi ng cmphasi on unified th eo ries o f all for es including grav itation . R1cmannian gcomotr is usually incorpo.ratctl as a se ri es of pre Knpti ons. starting with the introduction of a i..:c ond -r:rnk ~y m mctril: tcn·or fi ' ld, the metri c g1.,,(x). -
Francis E. Low
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES F R A N C I S E . L OW 1 9 2 1 – 2 0 0 7 A Biographical Memoir by DAVID KAISER AND MARC A . K A S T N E R Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoir COPYRIGHT 2010 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES WASHINGTON, D.C. Courtesy of MIT Archives. FRANCIS E. LOW October 27, 1921–February 16, 2007 BY DAVID KAISER AND MARC A . K ASTNER RANCIS E. LOW, A MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Fsince 1967, died on February 16, 2007, in Haverford, Pennsylvania. His career exemplified the maturing of theo- retical physics in the United States during the years after World War II. Low also experienced some of the new roles for physicists, from organized political engagement and consulting on national security issues to high-level university administration. One of Low’s landmark articles helped to lay the groundwork for the renormalization-group approach in quantum field theory, a seminal technique in condensed- matter and particle physics. He also contributed influential approximation techniques for treating particle scattering. EARLY YEARS Low was an only child, who lived near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. His mother’s parents were physi- cians and socialists. In fact, his grandfather helped found the Socialist Party of America. His mother also became a doctor. She made house calls at night in Greenwich Village until she turned 80, treating patients such as anthropolo- gist Margaret Mead. -
A Singing, Dancing Universe Jon Butterworth Enjoys a Celebration of Mathematics-Led Theoretical Physics
SPRING BOOKS COMMENT under physicist and Nobel laureate William to the intensely scrutinized narrative on the discovery “may turn out to be the greatest Henry Bragg, studying small mol ecules such double helix itself, he clarifies key issues. He development in the field of molecular genet- as tartaric acid. Moving to the University points out that the infamous conflict between ics in recent years”. And, on occasion, the of Leeds, UK, in 1928, Astbury probed the Wilkins and chemist Rosalind Franklin arose scope is too broad. The tragic figure of Nikolai structure of biological fibres such as hair. His from actions of John Randall, head of the Vavilov, the great Soviet plant geneticist of the colleague Florence Bell took the first X-ray biophysics unit at King’s College London. He early twentieth century who perished in the diffraction photographs of DNA, leading to implied to Franklin that she would take over Gulag, features prominently, but I am not sure the “pile of pennies” model (W. T. Astbury Wilkins’ work on DNA, yet gave Wilkins the how relevant his research is here. Yet pulling and F. O. Bell Nature 141, 747–748; 1938). impression she would be his assistant. Wilkins such figures into the limelight is partly what Her photos, plagued by technical limitations, conceded the DNA work to Franklin, and distinguishes Williams’s book from others. were fuzzy. But in 1951, Astbury’s lab pro- PhD student Raymond Gosling became her What of those others? Franklin Portugal duced a gem, by the rarely mentioned Elwyn assistant. It was Gosling who, under Franklin’s and Jack Cohen covered much the same Beighton. -
Conformal Field Theories of Stochastic Loewner Evolutions
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by CERN Document Server Conformal Field Theories of Stochastic Loewner Evolutions. [ CFTs of SLEs ] Michel Bauer1 and Denis Bernard2 Service de Physique Th´eorique de Saclay CEA/DSM/SPhT, Unit´e de recherche associ´ee au CNRS CEA-Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France Abstract Stochastic Loewner evolutions (SLEκ) are random growth pro- cesses of sets, called hulls, embedded in the two dimensional upper half plane. We elaborate and develop a relation between SLEκ evo- lutions and conformal field theories (CFT) which is based on a group theoretical formulation of SLEκ processes and on the identification of the proper hull boundary states. This allows us to define an in- finite set of SLEκ zero modes, or martingales, whose existence is a consequence of the existence of a null vector in the appropriate Vira- soro modules. This identification leads, for instance, to linear systems for generalized crossing probabilities whose coefficients are multipoint CFT correlation functions. It provides a direct link between confor- mal correlation functions and probabilities of stopping time events in SLEκ evolutions. We point out a relation between SLEκ processes and two dimensional gravity and conjecture a reconstruction proce- dure of conformal field theories from SLEκ data. 1Email: [email protected] 2Member of the CNRS; email: [email protected] 1 1 Introduction. Two dimensional conformal field theories [2] have produced an enormous amount of exact results for multifractal properties of conformally invariant critical clusters. See eg. refs.[15, 5, 9] and references therein. -
From Vibrating Strings to a Unified Theory of All Interactions
Barton Zwiebach From Vibrating Strings to a Unified Theory of All Interactions or the last twenty years, physicists have investigated F String Theory rather vigorously. The theory has revealed an unusual depth. As a result, despite much progress in our under- standing of its remarkable properties, basic features of the theory remain a mystery. This extended period of activity is, in fact, the second period of activity in string theory. When it was first discov- ered in the late 1960s, string theory attempted to describe strongly interacting particles. Along came Quantum Chromodynamics— a theoryof quarks and gluons—and despite their early promise, strings faded away. This time string theory is a credible candidate for a theoryof all interactions—a unified theoryof all forces and matter. The greatest complication that frustrated the search for such a unified theorywas the incompatibility between two pillars of twen- tieth century physics: Einstein’s General Theoryof Relativity and the principles of Quantum Mechanics. String theory appears to be 30 ) zwiebach mit physics annual 2004 the long-sought quantum mechani- cal theory of gravity and other interactions. It is almost certain that string theory is a consistent theory. It is less certain that it describes our real world. Nevertheless, intense work has demonstrated that string theory incorporates many features of the physical universe. It is reasonable to be very optimistic about the prospects of string theory. Perhaps one of the most impressive features of string theory is the appearance of gravity as one of the fluctuation modes of a closed string. Although it was not discov- ered exactly in this way, we can describe a logical path that leads to the discovery of gravity in string theory. -
The Fuzzball Proposal for Black Holes: an Elementary Review
hep-th/0502050 The fuzzball proposal for black holes: an elementary review1 Samir D. Mathur Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA [email protected] Abstract We give an elementary review of black holes in string theory. We discuss BPS holes, the microscopic computation of entropy and the ‘fuzzball’ picture of the arXiv:hep-th/0502050v1 3 Feb 2005 black hole interior suggested by microstates of the 2-charge system. 1Lecture given at the RTN workshop ‘The quantum structure of space-time and the geometric nature of fundamental interactions’, in Crete, Greece (September 2004). 1 Introduction The quantum theory of black holes presents many paradoxes. It is vital to ask how these paradoxes are to be resolved, for the answers will likely lead to deep changes in our understanding of quantum gravity, spacetime and matter. Bekenstein [1] argued that black holes should be attributed an entropy A S = (1.1) Bek 4G where A is the area of the horizon and G is the Newton constant of gravitation. (We have chosen units to set c = ~ = 1.) This entropy must be attributed to the hole if we are to prevent a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. We can throw a box of gas with entropy ∆S into a black hole, and see it vanish into the central singularity. This would seem to decrease the entropy of the Universe, but we note that the area of the horizon increases as a result of the energy added by the box. It turns out that if we assign (1.1) as the entropy of the hole then the total entropy is nondecreasing dS dS Bek + matter 0 (1.2) dt dt ≥ This would seem to be a good resolution of the entropy problem, but it leads to another problem. -
String Theory for Pedestrians
String Theory for Pedestrians – CERN, Jan 29-31, 2007 – B. Zwiebach, MIT This series of 3 lecture series will cover the following topics 1. Introduction. The classical theory of strings. Application: physics of cosmic strings. 2. Quantum string theory. Applications: i) Systematics of hadronic spectra ii) Quark-antiquark potential (lattice simulations) iii) AdS/CFT: the quark-gluon plasma. 3. String models of particle physics. The string theory landscape. Alternatives: Loop quantum gravity? Formulations of string theory. 1 Introduction For the last twenty years physicists have investigated String Theory rather vigorously. Despite much progress, the basic features of the theory remain a mystery. In the late 1960s, string theory attempted to describe strongly interacting particles. Along came Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)– a theory of quarks and gluons – and despite their early promise, strings faded away. This time string theory is a credible candidate for a theory of all interactions – a unified theory of all forces and matter. Additionally, • Through the AdS/CFT correspondence, it is a valuable tool for the study of theories like QCD. • It has helped understand the origin of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of black holes. • Finally, it has inspired many of the scenarios for physics Beyond the Standard Model of Particle physics. 2 Greatest problem of twentieth century physics: the incompatibility of Einstein’s General Relativity and the principles of Quantum Mechanics. String theory appears to be the long-sought quantum mechanical theory of gravity and other interactions. It is almost certain that string theory is a consistent theory. It is less certain that it describes our real world. -
Spacetime Geometry from Graviton Condensation: a New Perspective on Black Holes
Spacetime Geometry from Graviton Condensation: A new Perspective on Black Holes Sophia Zielinski née Müller München 2015 Spacetime Geometry from Graviton Condensation: A new Perspective on Black Holes Sophia Zielinski née Müller Dissertation an der Fakultät für Physik der Ludwig–Maximilians–Universität München vorgelegt von Sophia Zielinski geb. Müller aus Stuttgart München, den 18. Dezember 2015 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Stefan Hofmann Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Georgi Dvali Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 13. April 2016 Contents Zusammenfassung ix Abstract xi Introduction 1 Naturalness problems . .1 The hierarchy problem . .1 The strong CP problem . .2 The cosmological constant problem . .3 Problems of gravity ... .3 ... in the UV . .4 ... in the IR and in general . .5 Outline . .7 I The classical description of spacetime geometry 9 1 The problem of singularities 11 1.1 Singularities in GR vs. other gauge theories . 11 1.2 Defining spacetime singularities . 12 1.3 On the singularity theorems . 13 1.3.1 Energy conditions and the Raychaudhuri equation . 13 1.3.2 Causality conditions . 15 1.3.3 Initial and boundary conditions . 16 1.3.4 Outlining the proof of the Hawking-Penrose theorem . 16 1.3.5 Discussion on the Hawking-Penrose theorem . 17 1.4 Limitations of singularity forecasts . 17 2 Towards a quantum theoretical probing of classical black holes 19 2.1 Defining quantum mechanical singularities . 19 2.1.1 Checking for quantum mechanical singularities in an example spacetime . 21 2.2 Extending the singularity analysis to quantum field theory . 22 2.2.1 Schrödinger representation of quantum field theory . 23 2.2.2 Quantum field probes of black hole singularities . -
Scaling Laws in Particle Physics and Astrophysics
SCALING LAWS IN PARTICLE PHYSICS AND ASTROPHYSICS RUDOLF MURADYAN Dedicated to the Golden Jubilee (1961-2011) of publication of the article by Geoffrey Chew and Steven Frautschi in Phys. Rev. Lett. 7, 394, 1961, where a celebrated scaling law J m2 has been conjectured for spin/mass dependence of hadrons. G. Chew S. Frautschi 1. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS SCALING? Any polynomial power law f() x c xn , where constant c has a dimension dim f dimc (dimx )n exhibits the property of scaling or scale invariance. Usually n is called scaling exponent. The word scaling express the fact that function f is shape-invariant with respect to the dilatation transformation x x f ( x) c ( x)n n f() x and this transformation preserves the shape of function f . We say, following Leonhard Euler, that f is homogeneous of degree “n” if for any value of parameter f ( x) n f() x . Differentiating this relation with respect to and putting 1we obtain simple differential equation x f() x n f() x solution of which brings back to the polynomial power scaling law. There are tremendously many different scaling laws in Nature. The most important of them can be revealed by Google search of scaling site:nobelprize.org in the official site of Nobel Foundation, where nearly 100 results appears. Ten of them are shown below: 1. Jerome I. Friedman - Nobel Lecture 2. Daniel C. Tsui - Nobel Lecture 3. Gerardus 't Hooft - Nobel Lecture 4. Henry W. Kendall - Nobel Lecture 5. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes - Nobel Lecture 6. Jack Steinberger - Nobel Lecture 7.