scientific article; zbMATH DE number 193147

Authors

Publication date 5 June 1993

Proceedings of conferences of miscellaneous specific interest (00B25) Proceedings, conferences, collections, etc. pertaining to differential geometry (53-06) Applications of global differential geometry to the sciences (53C80) Proceedings, conferences, collections, etc. pertaining to quantum theory (81-06) Renormalization group methods applied to problems in quantum field theory (81T17) Supersymmetric field theories in quantum mechanics (81T60)

Review text

The topics appearing in the title of this volume constitute what at present definitely are the most vigorous research areas in quantum field theory. They are also distinguished by their high degreee of involvement in pure mathematics, in particular differential geometry and group theory. Review talks of a more or less pedagogical nature make up more than half of the volume, the rest consisting of shorter research papers. There are four review papers touching the subject of anomalies. R. Jackiw discusses functional representations for quantized fields, including the only recently constructed Schrödinger picture for fermionic field theories. Although purely formal, this construction offers the possibility of surveying inequivalent Fock spaces within one functional space, as exemplified in the case of scalar field theory in de Sitter space. Another advantage of the Schrödinger picture is that other renormalization procedures than normal ordering are available. These are used to rederive the conformal anomaly for bosons and fermions in two dimensions. A prelude to the theory of anomalies is provided by a beautiful series of lectures by A. P. Balachandran on Wess-Zumino terms, quantum symmetries, and quantization on multiply connected spaces. All this is explained using simple examples from classical mechanics. Two lectures on anomalies and cohomology by Kuang-Chao Chou, Han-Ying Guo and Xing-Chang Song review recent work done in China, stressing that both the so-called covariant and the consistent anomaly share common cohomology meaning. The path integral approach to anomalies is put forward by its inventor, K. Fujikawa, but the main subject of his contribution is a unified treatment of quantum symmetries based on the BRS symmetry, which is illustrated also for the bosonic string and membrane. Among the papers on conformally invariant field theories in two dimensions the first to be mentioned is the masterful exposition (requiring some previous knowledge on the part of the reader, though) by C. Itzykson on the role of conformal and modular invariance in two- dimensional statistical systems at criticality. Of a more technical nature are the papers by T. Eguchi on conformal and current algebras on a general Riemann surface and on chiral bosonization on a Riemann surface, as well as I. G. Koh's and H. J. Shin's pedagogical introduction to theta functions and Y. Kazama's introduction to twisted conformal fields. The papers just mentioned are, of course, also relevant for string theories, which may be considered as two-dimensional conformal field theories. In the last few years the number of possible consistent superstring models has increased enormously. The supergravity theories emerging as the point field limit of various string compactifications and of more general constructions are considered in the contribution of S. Ferrara. There is also an authoritative review of bosonic string field theory by T. Kugo, a member of the Kyoto group who developed the field theory of strings interacting via joining and splitting. The other main type of interacting string field theory, due to Witten, is also dealt with briefly. The research papers, some of which cover also other topics than appear in the title of the book, will not be reviewed here, but as a final paper of a more general interest I would like to mention Ngee-Pong Chang's treatise on bifurcation theory and dynamical symmetry breaking in quantum field theory. [The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually.]

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