Musings

Strings 2004, Day 1

Some photos from the Registration at the École Normale Supérieur:

The hall at the Collège de France is quite beautiful, but too small for the assembled multitude. Sacha Polyakov gave the first talk on his recent work on new gauge theories from strings on certain homogeneous spaces for supergroups (like $Osp(2|4)$). His model is $kappa$-supersymmetric. There are two ways to attempt to deal with $\kappa$-supersymmetry. One is to quantize covariantly, which is generally very thorny, made all the thornier here by the nonpolynomial form of his action. His approach is to fix the $\kappa$-supersymmetry, in which case one needs to check covariance of the quantum theory. He said that $\kappa$-supersymmetry implies conformal invariance, which I don’t think is true, and which, in any case, does not seem to be the issue.

View from my hotel window, dusk.

He ended with a quote from Carl Jung, which seems only appropriate.

Mike Douglas’s talk also included a quote. This one from the poet Paul Valéry,

Tout ce qui est simple est faux, mais tout ce qui ne l’est pas est inutilisable.

a wise statement, but I still fear that Mike is studying the statistics of the empty set (or very nearly empty).

My favourite talk of the morning was Walcher’s on his work with Hori on D-branes in Landau-Ginsburg Theory.

I didn’t get very much out of Vasiliev’s talk in the afternoon, but Witten’s question afterwards was very clarifying. The conjecture seems to be that Vasiliev’s higher-spin gauge theory in the bulk AdS is equivalent to a free-field theory on the boundary. Nontrivial interactions of the bulk theory are obtained when we look at correlation functions of multi-linears in the boundary fields. Or something like that …

Rajesh Gopakumar gave a very interesting talk on rewriting free field gauge theory amplitudes in a stringy fashion (motivated by the AdS/CFT correspondence (I,II). The result looks intriguingly like an integral over the moduli space of genus-g surfaces with n punctures. The idea is to take the integrand and try to reconstruct the corresponding string theory.

I’ve blogged about the $a$-maximization conjecture before, but Ken Intriligator’s talk was a really nice summary, probably the highlight of the afternoon.

Thhhaaat’s all for today, folks…