Worldlines, strings and unified theory

by Dr James Edwards (CPT, University of Durham, UK)

Monday 22 Jun 2015, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Rome

Aula Teorici (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia)

The worldline approach reformulates quantum field theory in terms of point particles described by simple quantum mechanics. This formalism can offer significant computational advantages over conventional field theory. I will describe how the resulting worldline theory can be modified to include non-Abelian symmetry and chirality and will demonstrate a novel method of generating the representations and chiralities of particles according to thestandard model and well-known unified theories. I will also describe how these ideas are related to a theory of tensionless spinning strings which interact on contact. These strings serve to mediate the interaction between the worldlines and the gauge field and produce the group theoretic information of the non-Abelian field theory. There is promise that this string theory admits an anomaly free description in four dimensional target space and that it offers a new way of coupling the field theory to gravity.