The book aims to analyze and explore deep and profound relations between string field theory, higher spin gauge theories and holography — the disciplines that have been on the cutting edge of theoretical high energy physics and other fields. These intriguing relations and connections involve some profound ideas in number theory, which appear to be part of a unifying language to describe these connections.
The book aims to analyze and explore deep and profound relations between string field theory, higher spin gauge theories and holography--the disciplines that have been on the cutting edge of theoretical high energy physics and other fields. These intriguing relations and connections involve some profound ideas in number theory, which appear to be part of a unifying language to describe these connections.
Symmetries play a fundamental role in physics. Non-Abelian gauge symmetries are the symmetries behind theories for massless spin-1 particles, while the reparametrization symmetry is behind Einstein's gravity theory for massless spin-2 particles. In supersymmetric theories these particles can be connected also to massless fermionic particles. Does Nature stop at spin-2 or can there also be massless higher spin theories. In the past strong indications have been given that such theories do not exist. However, in recent times ways to evade those constraints have been found and higher spin gauge theories have been constructed. With the advent of the AdS/CFT duality correspondence even stronger indications have been given that higher spin gauge theories play an important role in fundamental physics.All these issues were discussed at a recent international workshop in Singapore where the leading scientists in the field participated. This volume presents an up-to-date, detailed overview of the theories including its historic background, as well as the latest accomplishments in understanding the foundational properties of higher spin physics.
The conference String-Math 2014 was held from June 9–13, 2014, at the University of Alberta. This edition of String-Math is the first to include satellite workshops: “String-Math Summer School” (held from June 2–6, 2014, at the University of British Columbia), “Calabi-Yau Manifolds and their Moduli” (held from June 14–18, 2014, at the University of Alberta), and “Quantum Curves and Quantum Knot Invariants” (held from June 16–20, 2014, at the Banff International Research Station). This volume presents the proceedings of the conference and satellite workshops. For mathematics, string theory has been a source of many significant inspirations, ranging from Seiberg-Witten theory in four-manifolds, to enumerative geometry and Gromov-Witten theory in algebraic geometry, to work on the Jones polynomial in knot theory, to recent progress in the geometric Langlands program and the development of derived algebraic geometry and n-category theory. In the other direction, mathematics has provided physicists with powerful tools, ranging from powerful differential geometric techniques for solving or analyzing key partial differential equations, to toric geometry, to K-theory and derived categories in D-branes, to the analysis of Calabi-Yau manifolds and string compactifications, to modular forms and other arithmetic techniques. Articles in this book address many of these topics.
This book is an introduction to the theory of interacting higher spin gauge fields. It describes in a pedagogical way the methods used, and the results obtained, within the three major approaches to the subject: the Dirac light-front theory, the Fronsdal covariant approach and the Vasiliev AdS theory. Abstract concepts and methods unifying the various appproaches are pointed out. The book follows the ideas behind the first volume; explains the mathematical concepts and tools used, while also reviewing the history of the subject.
This volume covers the most up-to-date findings on string field theory. It is presented in a new approach as a result of insights gained from the theory. This includes the use of a universal method for treating free field theories, which allows the derivation of a single, simple, free, local, Poincare-invariant, gauge-invariant action that can be applied directly to any fields.
By higher-spin (HS) field one means generalizations of the electromagnetic potential or of the metric fluctuation that transform under arbitrary representations of the Lorentz group. Conceptual difficulties have long been identified in attempts to couple massless higher-spin modes in a Minkowski background. However, the key classic no-go theorems typically do not apply in the presence of infinite numbers of them. String Theory clearly leads the way to date, since its spectra involves a plethora of massive HS modes, however, a key question is whether String Theory itself is part of a more general structure for higher-spin interactions, and what role it possibly plays in it. For massive fields, one expects that an effective Lagrangian description be possible below the scale of their masses, and therefore in this Thesis String Theory is taken as a starting point to exhibit for the first time a number of couplings involving higher-spin modes. The novelty is here the explicit computation of tree-level scattering amplitudes for massive modes. The Weyl calculus allows to present the whole set of cubic and quartic string couplings and the resulting currents in a suggestive form.
This volume presents the following topics: non-Abelian Toda models, brief remarks for physicists on equivariant cohomology and the Duistermaat-Heckman formula, Casimir effect, quantum groups and their application to nuclear physics, quantum field theory, quantum gravity and the theory of extended objects, and black hole physics and cosmology.
This volume is a compilation of lectures delivered at the TASI 2015 summer school, 'New Frontiers in Fields and Strings', held at the University of Colorado Boulder in June 2015. The school focused on topics in theoretical physics of interest to contemporary researchers in quantum field theory and string theory. The lectures are accessible to graduate students in the initial stages of their research careers.