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## A sad funeral call for Twistors, this Friday.

Tomorrow Friday, at 9.10 in Paris, Ed Witten will deliver his reading on twistors.

At a high probability, this date will mark the sad end of this mathematical structure. It will become embedded in a hundred of papers unfocusing any previously known detail of Penrose' objects, which will adquire past tomorrow a completely new meaning.

Of course it is happening since December, and Witten's article has already got over 40 citations.

Anticipating Marcus, I will review Spires:
FIND T TWISTOR OR T TWISTORS AND DATE
1999 -> 6
2000 -> 10
2001 -> 10
2002 -> 0
2003 -> 6 (Incl. 0312171)
... BEFORE 2004: 258 papers
2004 -> 16

The top-cited papers on twistors

180) Edward Witten, TWISTOR - LIKE TRANSFORM IN TEN-
DIMENSIONS.
Nucl.Phys.B266:245,1986.

169) R. Penrose, M.A.H. MacCallum, TWISTOR THEORY: AN
APPROACH TO THE QUANTIZATION OF FIELDS AND SPACE-TIME.
Phys.Rept.6:241-316,1972.

163) Dmitri P. Sorokin, V.I. Tkach, D.V. Volkov,
SUPERPARTICLES, TWISTORS AND SIEGEL SYMMETRY.
Mod.Phys.Lett.A4:901-908,1989.

159) R. Penrose, NONLINEAR GRAVITONS AND CURVED TWISTOR
THEORY.
Gen.Rel.Grav.7:31-52,1976.

113) R. Penrose, TWISTOR ALGEBRA.
J.Math.Phys.8:345,1967.

61) Ingemar Bengtsson, Martin Cederwall, PARTICLES, TWISTORS
AND THE DIVISION ALGEBRAS.
Nucl.Phys.B302:81,1988.

60) A. Galperin, E. Sokatchev, A TWISTOR LIKE D = 10
SUPERPARTICLE ACTION WITH MANIFEST N=8 WORLDLINE
SUPERSYMMETRY.
Phys.Rev.D46:714-725,1992.

57) Y. Eisenberg, S. Solomon, THE TWISTOR GEOMETRY OF THE
COVARIANTLY QUANTIZED BRINK-SCHWARZ SUPERPARTICLE.
Nucl.Phys.B309:709,1988.

Witten's hep-th/0312171 has already got 41 citations.
 PhysOrg.com physics news on PhysOrg.com >> Kenneth Wilson, Nobel winner for physics, dies>> Two collider research teams find evidence of new particle Zc(3900)>> Scientists make first direct images of topological insulator's edge currents

Recognitions:
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 Quote by arivero ... At a high probability, this date will mark the sad end of this mathematical structure...
Sólo una cosa no hay. Es el olvido.

Blog Entries: 4

## A sad funeral call for Twistors, this Friday.

My contribution to the funeral is the last paper in arxiv where you can find the word twistor in the abstract
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0406251
The affine ambitwistor space as the moduli space of SUYM in $AdS_5\otimes S^5$
Authors: Bo-Yu Hou, Bo-Yuan Hou, Xiao-Hui Wang, Chuan-Hua Xiong, Rui-Hong Yue

By enlarge the $gl(2,2)$ symmetry with the twisted $U(1)\times U(1)$ reparametrization symmetry, we find a gauged WZNW action of YM field. The left and right twistor structure of left and right $\alpha$-plane glue into a ambitwitor. The affine dressing symmetry enables to find twisted monopoles. We argue that its moduli space will be the moduli of N=2 SUSY.

Recognitions:
Gold Member
 Quote by meteor My contribution to the funeral is the last paper in arxiv where you can find the word twistor in the abstract http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0406251 The affine ambitwistor space as the moduli space of SUYM in $AdS_5\otimes S^5$ Authors: Bo-Yu Hou, Bo-Yuan Hou, Xiao-Hui Wang, Chuan-Hua Xiong, Rui-Hong Yue By enlarge the $gl(2,2)$ symmetry with the twisted $U(1)\times U(1)$ reparametrization symmetry, we find a gauged WZNW action of YM field. The left and right twistor structure of left and right $\alpha$-plane glue into a ambitwitor. The affine dressing symmetry enables to find twisted monopoles. We argue that its moduli space will be the moduli of N=2 SUSY.
that is funny meteor
perhaps the worms have already arrived even before the funeral
but seriously if it is good mathematics then it lives on

I just watched the 3 hour-long lectures that Penrose gave at princeton
in october 2003, entitled "Fashion, Faith, Fantasy"