Strings, conformal fields, and topology. An introduction (Q1188961)

The unification of the two great physical theories that have emerged during this century, namely quantum theory and general relativity theory, is one of the most challenging and complicated problems in the systematic process of cognition within the contemporary physical and mathematical sciences. Some of the greatest thinkers of our century, among them W. Pauli, A. Einstein and W. Heisenberg, tried to tackle this fundamental problem of unification and, ultimately, failed to come to grips with the crucial fact that these two basic theories are of entirely different nature, not only with regard to their underlying physical assumptions and principles but also concerning their mathematical framework. As late as in the recent two decades, superstring theory has proved itself to be a leading, promising candidate for a unified theory of all the fundamental physical forces. Accordingly, the theory of (super-) strings has advanced to a great extent, and at an enormous pace during the last few years, so that it has become fairly difficult for students, non-experts, and mathematicians to keep track systematically of the recent developments in both the physical model theory and the applications of the more and more advanced mathematical tools. There is, by this time, no lack of comprehensive introductions to the foundations of string theory. Amongst the most recent and profound ones is the two-volume work by \textit{M. B. Green}, \textit{J. H. Schwarz} and \textit{E. Witten} [Superstring theory, Vols. I and II (Cambridge Univ. Press, London 1987; Zbl 0619.53002)], as also the author's previous textbook [Introduction to superstrings (Springer, Berlin 1988; Zbl 0655.58001)]. Now the present textbook aims at acquainting the reader with some additional and new material not yet covered systematically in related textbooks, including his already mentioned previous one. Thus, in a sense, the present book may be understood as being both a continuation and a complementary text with respect to the author's earlier work, although the overlap between both books is reduced to a minimum and just concentrated on the common background material from the fundamentals of string theory. As the distinctive purpose of his new book is to lead the reader up to the forefront of the current active research in string theory, the author chooses the driving problem for almost all recent research activities in this area, namely the search for the true vacuum of any string theory, as the central theme that ties together the various topics treated here. Accordingly, the material is roughly divided into two parts. Part I, consisting of Chapters 1 to 8, deals with conformal field theory and the perturbative vacuum. Here, after a brief introduction to superstring theory, the author discusses the various conformal field theory approaches to the perturbative vacuum, up to their present-day stage (e.g., the BPZ bootstrap and minimal models in Chapter 2; the WZW model and rational conformal field theory in Chapter 3; modular invariance and the A-D-E classification of modular invariants in Chapter 4; superconformal symmetry, minimal models and Calabi-Yau manifolds in Chapter 5; Ising models, solitons and Yang-Baxter relations in Chapter 6), reviews (in Chapter 7) the recent great process made in classifying all the possible conformal field theories and, finally, presents (in Chapter 8) the very recently discovered relationship between conformal field theories and topological knot theory. In fact, the material presented in Chapters 7 and 8 reflects the basic strategy for the first part of the book, and makes the whole project particularly valuable. There is, at present, nearly a jungle of conformal field theories arising from string theory, but no satisfactory classification, scheme for them. However, several methods for classification have been proposed in the recent literature (e.g., the coset construction by Goddard-Kent-Olive (1986), the Feigin-Fuks free field method (1985), the method of Landau-Ginzburg-Zamolodchikov and catastrophe theory (1986), and E. Witten's approach of using knot theory and the Chern-Simons gauge theory (1989)), each of them having its advantages and flaws, and the author analyzes and compares them systematically, indeed for the first time in a textbook. In particular, in Chapter 8, he spends much effort at the latest and most ambitious method to catalog large numbers of conformal field theories, which is E. Witten's idea of using Yang-Mills theory formulated as a purely topological Chern-Simons term in dimension three. Here he discusses the very recently discovered relationship between conformal field theories and quantum groups, on the one hand, and topological knot theory, knot groups, braid groups, knot invariants, and Jones polynomials, on the other hand. This approach, the so-called topological quantum field theory, is perhaps the key tool for investigating string theories in their natural state, i.e., beyond the Planck scale, and possibly the most promising topic of research in string theory, both at present and in the near future. In this sense, Chapter 8 really guides the reader to the utmost forefront of current research, not only in theoretical physics but also in mathematics. Part II of the book is devoted to non-perturbative methods in string theory. This is motivated, as the author carefully explains in the introduction and in the course of the first part, by the fact that perturbation theory fails to precisely describe the low-energy universe (i.e., the supersymmetry breaking in our low-energy world), and to select the true vacuum from among the billions of possible conformal field theories. Thus the author reviews, in Chapters 9 to 14, what is presently known about non-perturbative approaches to string theory. This is an extremely rewarding and useful undertaking of the author, which also appears to be the first systematic account in the textbook literature, all the more as the future of superstring research may lie, apart from topological quantum field theory, in the realm of non-perturbative models. In contrast to conformal field theories describing perturbative vacua, non-perturbative formulations and calculations are notoriously difficult to perform, but the author spares no pains to comprehensively explain the essential ideas, methods, and recent achievements in a systematic manner. Chapter 9 is of introductory character and discusses the phenomena of physics beyond the Planck scale (e.g., duality at the Planck scale, phase transition at the Hagedorn temperature, new symmetries at high energy, etc.). At the end, the most important non-perturbative approaches to string theory at the Planck scale (i.e., the approach via the universal moduli space of Riemann surfaces, the renormalization group method in gauge theory, the string field theory approach, and the generalization of E. Witten's topological field theory approach by S. Donaldson, A. Floer, and V. Jones) are briefly sketched, first with respect to their partial advantages and deficiencies. The following chapters then provide a more detailed account on these non-perturbative approaches. Chapter 10 deals with the first and second quantized string field theory, using recently found triangulations and coordinates for moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces (e.g., Harer coordinates, Penner coordinates). In Chapter 11 the author discusses the formulation of a non-polynomial action for the closed string field theory and the required corresponding conformal maps. This non-polynomial string field theory, which may be regarded as a generalization of Einstein's equations when power expanded around the graviton, was essentially initiated by the author himself and his collaborators. Chapter 12 is devoted to the attempt to derive all of string field theory from a group theoretic formalism based on the simplest principles of global and local symmetry. This approach, called geometric string field theory, basically consists in finding the representations of the universal string group, that is, in gauging the reparametrization group. In the course of this chapter, the author also discusses the problem of why there are so many string field theories, and what the relation between polynomial and nonpolynomial theories is. Chapter 13 provides an account on the method of matrix models, which give the first non-perturbative information in string theory and may be regarded, in a sense, as a theoretical laboratory for testing various string models. Although this approach gives precise non-perturbative information only in space-time dimension \(D\leq 1\), and seems to be qualitatively problematic in higher dimension, in particular in the critical dimensions 4, 10 or 26 matrix models are useful due to the fact that they are related, by their constraint equations, to the Ward identities in string field theories. Therefore, the combination of these approaches gives some hope for valuable insight into many not yet understood phenomena. The concluding Chapter 14 deals again with E. Witten's topological field theory approach which, in turn, was originally created as an attempt to use the sigma model as a tool to construct topological invariants for manifolds, that is, using ideas from physics to solve problems in geometry and topology. Witten's formulation was recently generalized by A. Floer, in that the Chern-Simons Yang-Mills theory in three dimensions could be included, and by S. Donaldson, who found new topological invariants in four dimensions using the instanton solutions of 4- dimensional Yang-Mills theory. These results, together with V. Jones' new polynomial invariants for knots, have led to the problem, posed by Sir M. F. Atiyah, if there are quantum field theories which uniformly generate these new topological invariants. E. Witten himself then showed that the answer is affirmative (1988/89), and that the theories of Floer, Donaldson, and Jones gave rise to two classes of topological field theories, namely (i) the metric-free topological models and (ii) the cohomological topological field theories. These two classes of topological field theories are discussed, in the physical context of the book, in Chapter 14. This includes such very recent topics as quantum fields and Morse theory, Sigma models and Floer theory, cohomological topological field theories (after Witten) and Faddeev-Popov ghosts, topological sigma models, topological 2D-gravity, Virasoro constraints, and Kadomtsev-Petviashvili hierarchies. It is, in particular, this material that enhances and up-dates the whole text substantially, and places, again, the interested reader at the frontiers of current research. Alltogether, this textbook is a highly welcome source to everyone who wants to learn about the principles, methods, results, advantages, and yet existing drawbacks of string theories at their present state. This, together with the increasing entanglement between physical field theory and current research in mathematics, is presented in a very enlightening and systematic way, with special emphasis on motivations, strategies, required assumptions and tools, as well as summarizing conclusions at the end of each chapter. Another feature of this textbook is that it is largely self-contained. However, there is a carefully selected and up- dated bibliography after each chapter, to which the author effectively refers, at any given time. Undoubtedly, Professor Kaku's new textbook on - so to speak - advanced string theory will become one of the preferred standard books on this central topic in physics and related mathematics, like his previous one already did.