String-Organized Field Theory

String theories should reduce to ordinary four-dimensional field theories at low energies. Yet the formulation of the two are so different that such a connection, if it exists, is not immediately obvious. With the Schwinger proper-time representation, and the spinor helicity technique, it has been shown that field theories can indeed be written in a string-like manner, thus resulting in simplifications in practical calculations, and providing novel insights into gauge and gra...

The status of string theory is reviewed, and major recent developments - especially those in going beyond perturbation theory in the string theory and quantum field theory frameworks - are discussed. This analysis helps better understand the role and place of string theory in the modern picture of the physical world. Even though quantum field theory describes a wide range of experimental phenomena, it is emphasized that there are some insurmountable problems inherent in it - ...

The success of the spinor helicity technique for tree processes is reviewed. To apply it to multiloop diagrams one is naturally led to the Schwinger proper-time representation, whose properties are discussed. This representation also serves as a useful link between field theories and string theories.

These notes on string theory are based on a series of talks I gave during my graduate studies. As the talks, this introductory essay is intended for young students and non-string theory physicists.

This book provides an introduction to string field theory (SFT). String theory is usually formulated in the worldsheet formalism, which describes a single string (first-quantization). While this approach is intuitive and could be pushed far due to the exceptional properties of two-dimensional theories, it becomes cumbersome for some questions or even fails at a more fundamental level. These motivations have led to the development of SFT, a description of string theory using t...

At the present time, string theory (and its generalizations) remain relatively abstruse subjects to the particle phenomenologist and experimentalist. Yet, striking developments of the last two years offer hope that a fundamental non-perturbative formulation of this theory will be found, and that this formulation will permit us to make contact with supersymmetric standard-model physics. This article is based on a talk which attempted to convey the essence of these recent devel...

This is an editorial summary of the contents of a Book comprising a set of Articles by acknowledged experts dealing with the impact of Field Theory on major areas of physics (from elementary particles through condensed matter to strings), arranged subjectwise under six broad heads. The Book which emphasizes the conceptual, logical and formal aspects of the state of the art in these respective fields, carries a Foreword by Freeman Dyson, and is to be published by the Indian Na...

This paper describes my talk given to the 27th Johns Hopkins Workshop: Symmetries and Mysteries of M Theory, G\"oteborg, Sweden, 24-26 August, 2003. After a brief introduction to the lightcone worldsheet formalism for summing the planar diagrams of field theory, I explain how the {\it uv} divergences of quantum field theory translate to the new language of string. It is shown through one loop that, at least for scalar cubic vertices, the counter-terms necessary for Poincar\'e...

This is a rendering of a review talk on the state of String Theory, given at the EPS-2003 Conference, intended for a wide audience of experimental and theoretical physicists. It emphasizes general ideas rather than technical aspects.

Even at tree level, the first quantized string theory suffers from apparent short distance singularities associated with collision of vertex operators that prevent us from straightforward numerical computation of various quantities. Examples include string theory S-matrix for generic external momenta and computation of the spectrum of string theory under a marginal deformation of the world-sheet theory. The former requires us to define the S-matrix via analytic continuation o...