From: baez@math.ucr.edu (John Baez)
Subject: This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 154)
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 18:14:21 -0700 (PDT)
Newsgroups: sci.math.research
Summary: [missing]
Keywords: Also available at http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week154.html
August 12, 2000
This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 154)
John Baez
At the 13th International Congress on Mathematical Physics, held
at Imperial College in London, I was suprised at how much energy
was focussed on quantum computation and quantum cryptography.
But it makes perfect sense - this is one area where fundamental
physics still has the potential to drastically affect everyday life.
I'm not sure quantum computation will ever be practical, but it's
certainly worth checking out. Quantum cryptography is well on its
way - though people are busy arguing just *how* practical it will be:
1) Hoi-Kwong Lo, Will quantum cryptography ever become a successful
technology in the marketplace?, preprint available as quant-ph/9912011.
It seems that both quantum computation and quantum cryptography are
becoming part of a bigger subject, perhaps called "quantum information
theory" - the study of how information can be transmitted and manipulated
in the context of quantum theory. There's certainly a need for good
theorems and definitions in this subject, as well as more experiments.
For example, nobody seems sure how to calculate the information capacity
of a quantum channel - or even how to define it!
If you're interested in this, it might be good to start with John
Preskill's lecture notes, which are available for free on the web:
2) John Preskill, Lecture notes on quantum computation and quantum
information theory, available at
http://www.theory.caltech.edu/people/preskill/ph229
Also try the references, homework problems, and links on this webpage.
There was also a lot of stuff about quantum gravity and string theory
at the ICMP. I especially enjoyed Robert Dijkgraaf's talk, for example.
Not just the cute animated movies of strings and D-branes, but the highly
n-categorical flavor of the whole thing - he even presented a picture
proof the Atiyah-Singer index theorem! It wasn't clear how relevant
this is to the physics of our particular universe, but at the end
of the talk Dijkgraaf urged us not to worry about that too much: after
all, the math is so pretty in its own right. Insofar as I'm a physicist
this makes me unhappy - but in my other persona, as a mathematician, it
makes sense.
I prefer to stay one or two trends behind the times when it comes to
string theory, since I'm not actually working on the subject - so it's
easier for me to learn about stuff after it's been prettied up a bit
by the mathematicians. Dijkgraaf's talk made me feel a vague
responsibility to tell you all about what's been going on lately in
string theory.... but I'm not really up on this stuff, so I will
discharge this duty in the laziest manner possible, by listing the
10 papers most cited by preprints on hep-th during the year 1999.
Here they are, from the top-cited one on down:
3) Juan Maldacena, The large N limit of superconformal field theories
and supergravity, Adv. Theor. Math. Phys. 2 (1998) 231-252, preprint
available as hep-th/9711200.
This one launched the "AdS-CFT" craze, by pointing out an interesting
relation between supergravity on anti-DeSitter spacetime and conformal
field theories on its "boundary at infinity".
4) Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten, Electric-magnetic duality, monopole
condensation, and confinement in N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory,
Nucl. Phys. B426 (1994) 19-52, preprint available as hep-th/9407087.
This one is ancient history by now, but it's still near the top of the
list! For mathematicians, this paper marked the birth of Seiberg-Witten
theory as a substitute for Donaldson theory when it comes to the study
of 4-dimensional smooth manifolds. (See "week44" and "week45".) But
for physicists, it highlighted the growing importance of "dualities"
relating seemingly different physical theories - of which the AdS-CFT
craze is a more recent outgrowth.
5) Edward Witten, String theory dynamics in various dimensions,
Nucl. Phys. B443 (1995) 85-126, preprint available as hep-th/9503124.
This paper was also important in the quest to understand dualities:
among other things, it argued that the type IIA superstring in 10
dimensions has as a low energy limit 11-dimensional supergravity -
reduced to 10 dimensions by curling up one dimension into a very
*large* circle. And as I described in "week118", this helped lead
to the search for "M-theory", of which 11-dimensional supergravity
is hoped to be a low-energy limit.
6) Edward Witten, Anti-DeSitter space and holography, Adv. Theor.
Math. Phys. 2 (1998) 253-291, preprint available as hep-th/9802150.
More on the AdS-CFT business.
7) S. S. Gubser, I. R. Klebanov, and A. M. Polyakov, Gauge theory
correlators from noncritical string theory, Phys. Lett. B428 (1998)
105-114, preprint available as hep-th/9802109.
Still more on the AdS-CFT business.
8) Joseph Polchinski, Dirichlet branes and Ramond-Ramond charges,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 (1995) 4724-4727, preprint available as
hep-th/9510017.
This helped launch the D-brane revolution: the realization that when
we take nonperturbative effects into account, open strings seem to
have their ends "stuck" on higher-dimensional surfaces called D-branes.
9) Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten, Monopoles, duality and chiral
symmetry breaking in N=2 supersymmetric QCD, Nucl. Phys. B431 (1994)
484-550, preprint available as hep-th/9408099.
More on what's now called Seiberg-Witten theory.
10) T. Banks, W. Fischler, S. H. Shenker, and L. Susskind, M-theory
as a matrix model: a conjecture, Phys. Rev. D55 (1997), 5112-5128,
preprint available as hep-th/9610043.
This was an attempt to given an explicit formulation for M-theory
in terms of a matrix model.
11) C. M. Hull and P. K. Townsend, Unity of superstring dualities,
Nucl. Phys. B438 (1995) 109-137, preprint available as hep-th/9410167.
More about dualities, obviously! (But also some stuff about the exceptional
Lie group E7, which is bound to tickle the fancy of any exceptionologist.)
12) Edward Witten, Bound states of strings and p-branes, Nucl. Phys.
B460 (1996), 335-350, preprint available as hep-th/9510135.
More on D-branes.
By the way: if you do physics, you can look up your *own* top cited
papers on the SPIRES database, at least if someone has cited you 50
or more times:
13) Searching top cited papers on SPIRES, at
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/hep/topcite.html
This will allow you to measure your fame in milliwittens.
And now for something completely different:
I've been thinking about Clifford algebras a lot recently, because I'm
writing a review article on the octonions and exceptional Lie groups, and
a good way to undestand this stuff is to use a lot of Clifford algebras
machinery. I talked about Clifford algebras in "week82", "week93",
and "week105", but here are some more nice books about them.
First, when I was giving a little talk on Clifford algebras at Nottingham
University after the ICMP, I needed to look up a few things, and I bumped
into this book:
14) P. Budinich and A. Trautman, The Spinorial Chessboard, Springer-Verlag,
Berlin, 1988.
Unfortunately it's out of print, but John Barrett happened to have a
copy. Springer should reprint it! It has a nice discussion of the
"Clifford algebra clock":
R
R+R C
R H
C H+H
H
As I explained in "week105", this clock easily lets you remember
the real Clifford algebras in every dimension and signature of
spacetime. Bott periodicity explains why it loops around after
8 hours. The spinorial chessboard presents the same information
in the form of an 8 x 8 grid. I won't draw it here, but it's a
picture of the Clifford algebras with p roots of -1 and q roots
of 1 for p,q = 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7. The black squares correspond to
cases that admit chiral spinors; the red ones correspond to cases
that don't. Black is when p+q is even; red is when it's odd.
By the way, I have a little question: why does the above clock have
a reflection symmetry along the line joining R+R and H+H?
Later, by coincidence, when I was in the library I discovered that
Chevalley's work on spinors has been reprinted:
15) Claude Chevalley, The Algebraic Theory of Spinors, Springer,
Berlin, 1991.
It has a lot of neat stuff on "pure spinors", which are closely related
to the "simple bivectors" that describe 2-planes in n-space. The latter
play an important role in spin foam models of quantum gravity, so I bet
pure spinors will too.
Here's another fundamental text, which really helped get the whole
subject going:
16) Eli Cartan, The Theory of Spinors, Dover Press, 1966.
While I'm at it, I should mention this book by the infamous Pertti Lounesto,
which is also good:
17) Pertti Lounesto, Clifford Algebras and Spinors, Cambridge U. Press,
Cambridge, 1997.
Another important book, especially for people who like exceptional groups,
is this one - I've referred to it before, but I just finally took a good
look at it:
18) F. Reese Harvey, Spinors and Calibrations, Academic Press, 1990.
There's some incredible stuff here about 7-dimensional Riemannian
manifolds whose holonomy groups lie in the exceptional Lie group G2.
I bet this stuff is gonna be important in string theory someday - if it
isn't already. After all, G2 is the automorphism group of the octonions,
and it has a 7-dimensional irreducible representation on the imaginary
octonions; as explained in "week104" by Robert Helling, the octonions
are secretly what let you write down the superstring Lagrangian in 10d
spacetime.
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