String Field Theory: Will It Outshine String Theories?

[Reedeegi]

Sifting through ArXiv and other sources, I've found many documents on the topic of String Field Theory, perhaps the most extensive being by Thorn, 1989*.
This brings up the question: Will String Field Theory evolve in popularity and perhaps outshine the more traditional String Theories? With all the popularity of field theories these days, I'd expect that it has such potential, but I don't really know.



*If you wish to read his 170 page introduction to SFT, go to Google Scholar and type in "String Field Theory Thorn" and find the PostScript document by Thorn.

 

[Coin]

My impression is that string field theory is being used less and less as time passes, rather than more.

When I look around for work using string field theory I seem to find it mostly comes from the 80s and 90s.

I don't know nearly enough about the subject to know why this is or whether it's deserved.

 

[Coin]

To correct my own post:

See this post at Not Even Wrong, partially about a talk by Polchinski wherein he predicted string field theory to be one of the three big growth areas in string theory. I asked if people thought string field theory was still going strong as a research program and got a response from "somebody":

Coin, in the last decade, there were two developments in string field theory that I consider “major”. One was from Ashoke Sen’s beautifully simple idea of tachyon condensation, which gave us the basic conceptual understanding of SFT that we have now. The second is Schnabl’s solution of the closed string theory vacuum, which is more technical, but has created some powerful new tools and has made previously intractable questions within reach.

I.E., studies of tachyon condensation within string theory are part of the subject of string field theory. Tachyon condensation is as far as I know a big deal in string theory lately. So it looks like my post before was incorrect.