Unification of the Fundamental Particle Interactions

ISBN-13: 9781461331735 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 727 str.

S. Ferrara; Jonathan Ellis; P. Van Nieuw

Opis

This volume constitutes the Proceedings of a Europhysics Study Conference held in Erice, Sicily from March 17 to 24, 1980. The objective of the meeting was to bring together practitioners of two different approaches to the unification of the fundamental par ticle interactions: supersymmetry and supergravity on the one hand, and grand unified gauge theories on the other hand. The hope was that exposure to each others' ideas and problems would at least aid mutual comprehension, and might start people thinking how to develop a synthesis of the two approaches which could avoid their individual shortcomings. It is not clear to us how successful the conference was in achieving these objectives. On the one hand many important ad vances in supersymmetric theories were reported which were primarily of a technical nature, while some interesting attempts to probe the phenomenological consequences of supersymmetry and supergravity were also presented. On the other hand there was considerable in terest in phenomenological aspects of grand unified theories such as proton decay, neutrino masses and oscillations, and links with cosmology. There was also some work on model-building but rela tively few purely technical advances. A few speakers tried to build bridges between the formalism of supersymmetry or supergravity and the phenomenologically successful gauge theories of elementary par ticle interactions."

Spis treści

Supergravities: Successes and Problems.- Neutrino Masses, Lepton Number Violation and Unification.- Exceptional Groups for Grand Unification.- A Simple Introduction to Complex Manifolds.- Precise Predictions of GUTs and of the Higgs Meson Mass.- Attempts at Superunification.- Unification Through a Supergroup.- Superspace.- Eleven-Dimensional Supergravity in Superspace.- N = 8 Supergravity.- The On-Shell N = 8 Supergravity in Superspace.- Supergravity and Cohomology Theory: Progress and Problems in D = 5.- Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theories.- What Is Supergravity and Which of its Goals Have Been Reached?.- Quark-Lepton Unification and Proton Decay.- Subcomponent Models for Quarks and Leptons: Difficulties and Perspectives.- Formulations of N = 2 Supergravity Theories.- Tensor Calculus for N = 2 Extended Supergravity.- Quantization of Supergravity with a Cosmological Constant.- A Short Appreciation of Joel Scherk and His Work.- Gravitation at Short Range and Supergravity.- Supergravity and Gauge Supersymmetry.- The Fermion Spectrum According to GUTs.- Magnetic Monopoles and Grand Unified Theories.- Grand Unification and Cosmology.- Cosmology Confronts Grand Unification.- Solution of the Bianchi Identities in SU(2) Extended Superspace with Constraints.- The U(l) Problem and Current Algebra.- Superfield Perturbation Theory.- Supersymmetric Regularization and Superconformal anomalies.- The Production of Magnetic Monopoles in the Very Early Universe.- Randomness as a Source of Massless Particles.- Supersymmetry, Particle Physics and Gravitation.- The Calculation of the Decay Rate of the Proton.- The Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven Nucleon Decay Search: Status Report on an Experiment Sensitive to a Lifetime of 1033 Years.- A Long Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiment Sensitive to Mass Differences of Hundredths of an Electron Volt.- Investigations on Nucleon Stability in Europe.- Supersymmetry Without Anticommuting Variables.- What is a Non-Trivial Solution in Supergravity?.- Supersymmetric Pre-QCD Dynamics.- The Gauge Invariant Supercurrent in SQED.- List of Authors.- Participants.