List of Publications Charles W
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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. -
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. -
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. -
Personal Recollections of the Early Days Before and After the Birth of Supergravity
Personal recollections of the early days before and after the birth of Supergravity Peter van Nieuwenhuizen I March 29, 1976: Dan Freedman, Sergio Ferrara and I submit first paper on Supergravity to Physical Review D. I April 28: Stanley Deser and Bruno Zumino: elegant reformulation that stresses the role of torsion. I June 2, 2016 at 1:30pm: 5500 papers with Supergravity in the title have appeared, and 15000 dealing with supergravity. I Supergravity has I led to the AdS/CFT miracle, and I made breakthroughs in longstanding problems in mathematics. I Final role of supergravity? (is it a solution in search of a problem?) I 336 papers in supergravity with 126 collaborators I Now: many directions I can only observe in awe from the sidelines I will therefore tell you my early recollections and some anecdotes. I will end with a new research program that I am enthusiastic about. In 1972 I was a Joliot Curie fellow at Orsay (now the Ecole Normale) in Paris. Another postdoc (Andrew Rothery from England) showed me a little book on GR by Lawden.1 I was hooked. That year Deser gave lectures at Orsay on GR, and I went with him to Brandeis. In 1973, 't Hooft and Veltman applied their new covariant quantization methods and dimensional regularization to pure gravity, using the 't Hooft lemma (Gilkey) for 1-loop divergences and the background field formalism of Bryce DeWitt. They found that at one loop, pure gravity was finite: 1 2 2 ∆L ≈ αRµν + βR = 0 on-shell. But what about matter couplings? 1\An Introduction to Tensor Calculus and Relativity". -
Introduction to Regge and Wheeler “Stability of a Schwarzschild Singularity”
September 24, 2019 12:14 World Scientific Reprint - 10in x 7in 11643-main page 3 3 Introduction to Regge and Wheeler “Stability of a Schwarzschild Singularity” Kip S. Thorne Theoretical Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 USA 1. Introduction The paper “Stability of a Schwarzschild Singularity” by Tullio Regge and John Archibald Wheeler1 was the pioneering formulation of the theory of weak (linearized) gravitational perturbations of black holes. This paper is remarkable because black holes were extremely poorly understood in 1957, when it was published, and the very name black hole would not be introduced into physics (by Wheeler) until eleven years later. Over the sixty years since the paper’s publication, it has been a foundation for an enormous edifice of ideas, insights, and quantitative results, including, for example: Proofs that black holes are stable against linear perturbations — both non-spinning • black holes (as treated in this paper) and spinning ones.1–4 Demonstrations that all vacuum perturbations of a black hole, except changes of its • mass and spin, get radiated away as gravitational waves, leaving behind a quiescent black hole described by the Schwarzschild metric (if non-spinning) or the Kerr metric (if spinning).5 This is a dynamical, evolutionary version of Wheeler’s 1970 aphorism “a black hole has no hair”; it explains how the “hair” gets lost. Formulations of the concept of quasinormal modes of a black hole with complex • eigenfrequencies,6 and extensive explorations of quasinormal-mode -
Chern-Simons Terms As an Example of the Relations Between Mathematics and Physics
PUBLICATIONS MATHÉMATIQUES DE L’I.H.É.S. STANLEY DESER Chern-Simons terms as an example of the relations between mathematics and physics Publications mathématiques de l’I.H.É.S., tome S88 (1998), p. 47-51 <http://www.numdam.org/item?id=PMIHES_1998__S88__47_0> © Publications mathématiques de l’I.H.É.S., 1998, tous droits réservés. L’accès aux archives de la revue « Publications mathématiques de l’I.H.É.S. » (http:// www.ihes.fr/IHES/Publications/Publications.html) implique l’accord avec les conditions géné- rales d’utilisation (http://www.numdam.org/conditions). Toute utilisation commerciale ou im- pression systématique est constitutive d’une infraction pénale. Toute copie ou impression de ce fichier doit contenir la présente mention de copyright. Article numérisé dans le cadre du programme Numérisation de documents anciens mathématiques http://www.numdam.org/ CHERN-SIMONS TERMS AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS by STANLEY DESER The inevitability of Chern-Simons terms in constructing a variety of physical models, and the mathematical advances they in turn generate, illustrate the unexpected but profound interactions between the two disciplines. 1 begin with warmest greetings to the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) on the occasion of its 40th birthday, and look forward to its successes in the years to come. My own association dates back to its early days in 1966-67 and it has continued fruitfully ever since. The IHÉS represents a unique synthesis between Mathematics and Physics, as empha- sized by this volume’s title. I propose to illustrate this synthesis through a particular set of examples, Chern-Simons "effects" in physics. -
Karl Popper's Enterprise Against the Logic of Quantum Mechanics
An Unpublished Debate Brought to Light: Karl Popper’s Enterprise against the Logic of Quantum Mechanics Flavio Del Santo Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), Vienna and Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, Austria and Basic Research Community for Physics (BRCP) Abstract Karl Popper published, in 1968, a paper that allegedly found a flaw in a very influential article of Birkhoff and von Neumann, which pioneered the field of “quantum logic”. Nevertheless, nobody rebutted Popper’s criticism in print for several years. This has been called in the historiographical literature an “unsolved historical issue”. Although Popper’s proposal turned out to be merely based on misinterpretations and was eventually abandoned by the author himself, this paper aims at providing a resolution to such historical open issues. I show that (i) Popper’s paper was just the tip of an iceberg of a much vaster campaign conducted by Popper against quantum logic (which encompassed several more unpublished papers that I retrieved); and (ii) that Popper’s paper stimulated a heated debate that remained however confined within private correspondence. 1. Introduction. In 1936, Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann published a paper aiming at discovering “what logical structure one may hope to find in physical theories which, unlike quantum mechanics, do not conform to classical logic” (Birkhoff and von Neumann, 1936). Such a paper marked the beginning of a novel approach to the axiomatization of quantum mechanics (QM). This approach describes physical systems in terms of “yes-no experiments” and aims at investigating fundamental features of theories through the analysis of the algebraic structures that are compatible with these experiments. -