Current status of twistor theory

[tom.stoer]

Can anybody present a brief summary regarding the current status of twistor theory?

What are the major problems and why has this research program failed? What has twistor theory to say about quantizing the spacetime manifold and/or general relativity?

Thanks
Tom

 

[tom.stoer]

150 accesses an not one single comment! is the the wrong place to ask this question?

 

[tiny-tim]

… why has this research program failed? …

Hi Tom!

I think twistor theory is just so obscure and unfashionable … and such a relative failure … that nobody here knows anythig about it.

(though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistor_Theory" does have one snippet of news:)

In 2003 Edward Witten used twistor theory to understand certain Yang-Mills amplitudes, by relating them to a certain string theory, the topological B model, embedded in twistor space.This field has come to be known as twistor string theory.

 

[tiny-tim]

Hi Tom!

Here's a couple of arXiv links which may be of interest …

http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.1078

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0512079

and of course you can find more on arXiv.

 

[Haelfix]

It depends what you mean by twistor theory. If you mean the quantum gravity proposal pioneered by Penrose, then I don't know who or how many people are working on that. If you mean twistors in the sense of studying YM amplitudes and its application to string theory and so forth, then the subject is booming.

Nima Arkani Hamed and his whole clique are pretty big into that atm and there's a lot of great work being done in it.

 

[Coin]

Haelfix, I've heard occasionally lately about this new intersection of Twistors with string theory but I still don't understand exactly what it entails. Is there any particular introduction to the subject you might be able to recommend?