Useful annotated overview of string theory literature

In summary: But this is wrong; the fields can come out of the vacuum in any way you like, and in fact they always do so in certain specific ways (which are described by the so-called "duality principle"). Apart from that, I think Kaku's book is really good, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in quantum field theory.
  • #1
jeff
Science Advisor
658
1
The following paper entitled Resource Letter: The Nature and Status of String Theory was authored by Donald Marolf
at UCSB. It gives a useful annotated overview of string theory literature, both popular and technical.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0311044
 
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  • #2
Originally posted by jeff
The following paper entitled Resource Letter: The Nature and Status of String Theory was authored by Donald Marolf
at UCSB. It gives a useful annotated overview of string theory literature, both popular and technical.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0311044

Yes indeed! I just read it , and came here with a link to the abstract :http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0311044

It is great that recent interest in stringtheory and its obvious problems are being scrutinized by many, and this paper as you state gives a good foundation for where to go in order to understand the basis for directions.
 
  • #3
The Fabric of the Cosmos

Hi physics boys,

I think that you deserve to be insiders. Brian Greene has finished his second popular book, The Fabric of the Cosmos,


http://edition.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/20/arts.deals.reut/index.html


I've read it and it looks great. There is some older material about string/M-theory in it, a newer material on cosmology (and stringy cosmology), inflation, the arrow of time, the speculations and facts on time travels etc., but also a great story of the space. Is space (and spacetime) a "something" or is it just a bookkeeping device to remember the relations between different events? Our answer to this question has changed many times as the centuries went.

I especially enjoyed the chapters on quantum entanglement (explained using a story with Mulder, Scully, and a gift from the Aliens). This chapter explains almost all aspects of various interpretations of quantum mechanics, and I believe that it is written in a better and more honest way than all other books on this subject that I've seen so far. Another chapter explains how these correlations can be used for "teleportation" of the objects. Well, teleportation has become a serious scientific topic, although we can't expect that it will be usable as some science-fiction movies suggest.

The book - a book that also contains a lot of up-to-date information about the experiments, the observations of the microwave background etc. - should appear on February 10th, 2004. I believe that all the people who enjoyed the books by Greene, Thorne, Kaku, Hawking, Gribbin, Gamow, and others should not forget about this new one! You will see why.

Best wishes
Luboš
 
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  • #4
Thanks for the info, lumidek! That sounds great.
 
  • #5
just reserved it at the local library and I'm #14 in the list
 
  • #6
Kaku has one coming out in Aprill, on Einstein and geometry - I saw it listed in a distributor's catalogue.
 
  • #7
Here is the link:
 
  • #9
oh well

Well, another example of somebody who is no real insider (he comes
from gravity but not from string theory) and so represents a biased
reading list - the most important developments of the last 1-2
years, namely the works of Vafa et al, are not mentioned, while
subjects such as the plane wave limit and non-BPS states are highly
over-emphasized. Moreover no mention of the important work of Douglas and others on D-geometry.

As usual, focus is on areas deemed interesting and important by
some, but not by all researchers, and mono-culture continues
to be bread. In some way, such an article does more harm than good.
 
  • #10
R.X. wrote:

Well, another example of somebody who is no real insider (he comes

Are you referring to Greene or to Kaku here?

Moreover no mention of the important work of Douglas and others on D-geometry.

Could you summarize the main ideas and results of this work?
 
  • #11
Originally posted by Urs
R.X. wrote:



Are you referring to Greene or to Kaku here?


Neither, nor - the thread is about Marolf's review and this is what I meant - a quite biased selection of topics, with no clear idea why some subjects he presents should be more important than others that he leaves out.

Since you brought up other names: what I wrote applies also, more or less, to Kaku as well.


Originally posted by Urs

Could you summarize the main ideas and results of this work?

Douglas initiated a program to understand the quantum properties of D-branes, starting from the appropriate mathematical formulation (which is in terms of derived categories). This is a bit complicated stuff, but conceptionally extremely important, and I mean this physicswise. Since it is not fashionable to work on it, not much attention has been paid to this subject, but unfairly so.

I would say that many if not most of those more phenomenologically oriented papers, on brane models and alike, are pretty off the track and sometimes even outright wrong, just because they do not take effects into account which we know from Douglas' work.

For example, many papers assume (in the context of a given brane model), that a brane-anti-brane pair breaks supersymmetry due to the tachyonic mode between them. They use this to feed some degree of SUSY breaking into their models. But we known from Douglas' work (via his concept of flow of gradings), that if you take the quantum geometry of those brane properly into account, then the notion of what a brane is and what an anti-brane is, is not a universal notion but depends on where you are in the moduli space. It generically so happens that a naive supersymmetry-breaking brane-antibrane pair turns into a susy preserving brane-brane pair in some other region of the moduli space.

In other words, from the effective action point of view, the naive brane-anti-brane system has a non-perturbative potential with a susy restoring minimum, somewhere in the moduli space.
This is probably not what the unsuspecting brane model builders had in mind... and they cannot know it if they didn't read Douglas' papers.

Summa summarum, it just doesn't make sense to attempt any sort of brane model building, without the knowledge of such effects. Admittedly, this is mathematically very complicated stuff, and this is why only few people know about it - most others go the easy way and ignore it.

Marolf's review does not mention this conceptionally important subject, as well as many other's work. As said, he is not an insider of these matters and probably doesn't know better. A priori, one may just not care, but the effect of such a review is that newcomers to the field get a biased impression of what is important to study and work on, and what not.

Certainly, what is important to study and what not,
could be debated over and is to some extent a matter of taste, but there is a limit of what is reasonable, especially for a review which claims to be a guide to the field. For example, mentioning non-BPS states as an important subject while leaving out the whole of Vafa's recent work is just outrageous.
 
  • #12
Many thanks for this helpful comment!

I bet you would do many of us a real favor if you could similarly sketch the content of Vafa's recent work and what its importance is in your opinion.
 
  • #13
Originally posted by Urs

I bet you would do many of us a real favor if you could similarly sketch the content of Vafa's recent work and what its importance is in your opinion.

Hmm... it's almost too much to do so - best thing for you is to
look up his list of papers in spires and check the citations yourself
- this will guide you to some of the important works:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=find+a+vafa%2Cc&FORMAT=WWWCITE&SEQUENCE= [Broken]
Comparing to others you see from this that he is one of the most
prolific and creative researchers (actually has always been but
currently dominates the field of string theory).


At any rate, here a few highlights:

General theme: topological strings. Not only (often exactly soluble)
toy models for things like large-N dualities, but they also capture
the holomorphic content (BPS sector) of supersymmetric string and
field theories; such as superpotentials and gauge couplings in N=1
SUSY theories, plus an infinite sequence of certain gravitational
couplings in the effective action.

- This framework has allowed to more or less solve the chiral
(holomorphic) sector of N=1 susy gauge theories and in particular
to determine their vauum structure. Most interesting is that all
of this can be phrased in terms of matrix models. This is work done
together with Dijkgraaf and others.

- Non-perturbative physics on Calabi-Yau spaces: mirror symmetry
has been used for a long time to determine effects that are
non-perturbative from the world-sheet point of view, but from the
space time point of view this was mostly tree level - ie, genus
zero in the perturbative expansion. This was useful for eg computing
effective actions of N=2 and N=1 string theories.
The underlying geometry was Calabi-Yau manifolds or "Seiberg-Witten"
Riemann surfaces.

Now the new works (culminating in hep-th/0312085) deal with the
full genus expansion in the string coupling g_s, and this makes
it possible to obtain results that are exact in the string coupling.
All of this has also a close relationship to integrable systems,
and this allows to write down some results explicitly. The underlying
geometry is some sort of quantum deformation of the geometries
indicated above; roughly, if a Calabi-Yau space or Riemann surface
at tree level is given by f(x,y)=0, then the exact quantum geometry
is characterized by a differential operator obtained by letting
x,y become conjugate symplectic variables; ie: f(x,y) -> f(x,d/dx).
The solution of f(x,d/dx) P = 0 is then the exponential of the
all-genus free energy, or exact partition function of the theory!

- In related very recent work hep-th/0312022, it was investigated
what the theory looks like in the strong coupling limit, where g_s
is large. It turns out that the relevant geometry becomes discrete
and has some analogy to melting of crystals. Most interesting in
this is the following: from the exact expressions one can infer
as to what the relevant "geometries" are, one is summing over in
(the relevant topological version of) quantum gravity.

Recall that it is sort of a dogma that one should appropriately
sum over background geometries in quantum gravity. The outcome of
the work under discussion is that the relevant "geometries" are
more general than what one usually calls geometry. [Actually from
the string perspective this is not too much surprising: we know
(esp from the work of Douglas et al) that in stringy D-brane
geometry, more general objects than manifolds or vector bundles
are relevant, rather sheaves and more general objects.]
That is, while a naive quantum gravity person may try to sit down
and sum over some "smooth manifolds", we learn from Vafa-et-al's
work what the right things are to sum over; at least in the
simplified topological context, where one can do exact computations
and obtain explicit results.

These matters are obviously of tremendous conceptional importance,
but since the papers are not easy to read and require quite an
effort to understand even for experts, I am not surprised that many
people are not aware of them. It would have been the duty of Marolf
when writing such a "ressource letter" to point this out to a larger
audience.
 
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  • #14
Thanks a lot for this summary.

I had once heard a talk by E. Mayr, a collaborator of Vafa, in which he summarized some aspects of the stuff related to the topological string that you mentioned. I will have to sit down and look at these things in more detail.

One further question, though:

I had asked Mayr about the role played by Matrix Models in these approaches and I recall that he pointed to a distinction between new, very new, old and very old Matrix Models. I think he said that the very new ones are essentially the same as the very old ones!

All this pretty much confused me, because apparanetly I don't know all flavors of Matrix Models. What I know and understand is the BFSS model and the IIB (IKKT) model.

What other Matrix Models are there and how are they related to BFSS and IKKT?
 
  • #15
Originally posted by Urs
Thanks a lot for this summary.

I had once heard a talk by E. Mayr, a collaborator of Vafa, in which he summarized some aspects of the stuff related to the topological string that you mentioned. I will have to sit down and look at these things in more detail.

One further question, though:

I had asked Mayr about the role played by Matrix Models in these approaches and I recall that he pointed to a distinction between new, very new, old and very old Matrix Models. I think he said that the very new ones are essentially the same as the very old ones!

All this pretty much confused me, because apparanetly I don't know all flavors of Matrix Models. What I know and understand is the BFSS model and the IIB (IKKT) model.

What other Matrix Models are there and how are they related to BFSS and IKKT?

For example the Kontsevich model, which is among the simplest MM that have a relation to TFT. Otherwise, have a look at the original papers of Dijkgraaf-Vafa for matrix models versus N=1 Yang-Mills, and to the recent paper on the topological vertex for MM describing various other TFT.

Actually much more could be said about all of this- I just bring this up in order to point ppl to really interesting and promising things to look at, rather than see them being mislead to exhausted, or otherwise not particularly interesting subjects.

BTW, you probably meant P.Mayr and not E.Mayr, der Genauigkeit halber !
 
  • #16
R.X., I am intersted in what you said about Douglas and his analysis in terms of derived categories. I did a search on the arxiv, and found several of his papers, but in order to understand them better I would like to work through an introduction to this branch of algebraic geometry. Do you know of one you could recommend? FYI my background is in algebraic topology.
 
  • #17
Well I am no mathematician and I can't really point out a good reference to derived categories -
however, most of what is necessary in the physics context can be gathered from Douglas' lectures,
eg for the more mathematically inclined see:
http://arxiv.org/abs/math.ag/0207021
and
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0110071

BTW what I wrote about SUSY breaking (or rather, the difficulty of achieving this with brane models)
is what the authors of the second paper write in the last section.

Moreover you may find some works of Lazaroiu useful:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0305095

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0102183

BTW He happens to be now at U of Wisconsin at Madison, potentially in your neighborhood...
 
  • #18
Thank you so much for the links. I have printed off Douglas' 2002 paper and am studying it. I am also looking at Lazaroiu's earlier paper. Exciting times!
 
  • #19
Barbon's survey of String Theory

just out

http://arxiv.org./hep-th/0404188 [Broken]

STRING THEORY
J.L.F. Barbon
Department of Physics, Theory Division, CERN Geneva

Abstract
"This is a rendering of a review talk on the state of String Theory, given at the EPS-2003 Conference, intended for a wide audience of experimental and theoretical physicists. It emphasizes general ideas rather than technical aspects."

it's a concise review: only 12 pages and a select list of 46 references
 
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  • #20
Barbon cites this earlier survey article
http://arxiv.org/hep-th/9905111 [Broken]
which is 261 pages and 757 references

Large N Field Theories, String Theory and Gravity
Ofer Aharony, Steven S. Gubser, Juan Maldacena, Hirosi Ooguri, and Yaron Oz

Barbon is recent, and Barbon says if you want a more extensive overview than he gives, then there are 3 references---2 of them are the standard books and not AFAIK online.
And the third is this huge online thing by Mssrs A,G,M,O and O

I don't know why Barbon didnt cite Marolf's. Maybe he had objections to it similar to those offered by R.X. a few posts back in this thread.
 
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  • #22
I just bought Zwiebach "first course". It is pretty "low level" since it is intended to (advanced) undergraduates. The first part reminds me of Hatfield's "Quantum Field Theory of Point Particles and Strings" in that it is both very simple and details the calculations. The second part goes less into details, but is a very good intro. Overall, it lies somewhere between Kaku (too few details, too ambitious) and Polchinski (great book too, more technical).

I wish I discovered strings through this book.

____________________________
I wanted to add that, of course, it is very up-to-date :rolleyes:
 
  • #23
A lot of the string theory math refers to or depends on K-theory, a branch of the mathematical field algebraic geometry. This can be a steep climb for those who are not already familiar with it, and I am glad to note that a beginner-friendly introduction has now appeared on the arxiv, at http://www.arxiv.org/abs/math?papernum=0602082. It is by Max Karoubi, a prominent worker in the field, and contains not just links but intelligent references to further reading.
 
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  • #24
Following a question on my blog, I pooled together everything I have found concerning String Theory, Field Theory, General Relativity & related mathematics.

You can find all this stuff http://stringschool.blogspot.com/2006/05/physics-mathematics-lecture-notes.html" [Broken]
Enjoy!
 
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  • #25
selfAdjoint said:
A lot of the string theory math refers to or depends on K-theory, a branch of the mathematical field algebraic geometry.

No, K-theory plays a very small role, and even that is over-emphasized. Roughly K-theory is cohomology plus torsion, and since torsion is of minor importance in most practicial string computations, so is the difference between K-theory and cohomology.

The K-theory story keeps flaoting around since quite some time, essentially because Witten brought the subject up and then others wrote in reviews that it must be important. But don't waste your time on that. Just have a quick check on the content of papers that really deal with K-theory. They are mostly about discrete Z_N charges of orientifold planes, and similar.

If you fancy higher math, better study derived categories which provide a much better and finer description of D-branes.
 

1. What is string theory?

String theory is a theoretical framework in physics that attempts to explain the fundamental nature of particles and the forces that govern them. It proposes that particles are not point-like objects, but rather tiny, vibrating strings.

2. Why is string theory important?

String theory is important because it has the potential to unify all of physics by explaining how the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force) work together. It also has the potential to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, two theories that have been difficult to reconcile in the past.

3. How has string theory advanced our understanding of the universe?

String theory has advanced our understanding of the universe by providing a framework for understanding the behavior of particles at the smallest scales, such as those found in black holes or during the Big Bang. It has also led to new insights and predictions about the nature of space and time.

4. What is the current status of string theory?

The current status of string theory is that it is still a theoretical framework and has not yet been proven through experimental evidence. However, it remains an active area of research and has made significant progress in recent years, including the development of new mathematical tools and potential connections to other areas of physics.

5. How can I learn more about string theory?

There are many resources available for learning about string theory, including books, online lectures, and academic papers. You can also attend conferences and workshops dedicated to the subject or join online discussion forums to engage with others interested in string theory. It is important to have a strong background in mathematics and physics to fully understand the concepts of string theory.

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