What Are the Latest Breakthroughs and Research Topics in M Theory?

[beno23]

does anyone know what are the most recent developments and breakthroughs on m theory...i don't seem to find anything big since holographic principle few years ago.

if there haven't been any big breakthroughs than what are the topics that are being studied right now?

does anyone know any useful website for this?

thx

 

[Kevin_Axion]

There isn't really anything new as String Theorists don't have a clear explanation of the theory. Although there was some progress in Matrix Theory about 12 years ago. Currently, there has been a lot of research in AdS/CFT which is a non-perturbative form of String Theory, which means it doesn't rely on power series approximations.

 

[mitchell porter]

The most recent development in M-theory was the "membrane minirevolution", in which new equations describing the fields on a stack of M2-branes were discovered (google BLG and ABJM for details, and it originates from "Basu-Harvey"). There's also been a lot of work on the more challenging M5-brane - e.g. two papers at arxiv last week, 1012.2880 and 1012.2882 - but there hasn't been a clear breakthrough there.

Other lines of inquiry include Martin Cederwall's use of pure spinors, Hisham Sati's ideas (also see Pierre Ramond's papers during the last 10 years), the various attempts to show that E10 or E11 is a hidden symmetry of M-theory, and also work on "generalized geometry". There's plenty of thinking and incremental progress occurring, and eventually quantity will become quality - someone will look at it all and say, wow, that all adds up to ... some big new insight about how the theory works. But until that happens, we just have technical progress and vague speculations.