OSMU24 is a talk series on Quantum Foundations, Particle Physics, and Unification of Forces running between February 16 to December 13, 2024. This week's lecture will be given by FQxI's Andrew Hamilton on "String Theory, Unification and Geometric Algebra" on Friday 1st November at 4pm (GMT). Each talk is one hour long, on Zoom (link, meeting ID 899 5693 1861 and passcode 451794), followed by an hour-long discussion session.
Abstract: It is commonly held that supersymmetry is essential to string theory, but this is false. The chief arguments against bosonic string theory without any supersymmetry are, first, that it does not admit fermions, and second, that its ground state is tachyonic, therefore unstable. But D-branes, discovered by Polchinski in 1995, are surfaces upon which open bosonic strings can end, and those D-branes can carry fermions. The tachyonic ground state is the open string carrying zero excitations, but this string has endpoints on the D-brane, and it interacts with fermions with the same gauge group as the massless gauge bosons. The properties of the tachyon are precisely those of a Higgs field: it is a multiplet of the unbroken symmetry; the "vacuum" state where the Higgs field vanishes identically is tachyonically unstable; and it has spin zero. I propose Clifford(11,1) string theory, a 26-dimensional, tachyonic, bosonic, open string theory, whose bosons occupy all 26 dimensions while their fermionic endpoints are confined to an 11+1 dimensional submanifold. The 26 dimensions compactify to 12 on the 14-dimensional self-dual torus of the rank 14 SU(8)xSU(8) subgroup of the group G^2(10)=U(16) generated by Clifford(11,1) multivectors of grade 2 (mod 4).
This set of lectures is intended to provide a forum for scientists who are pushing on the boundaries of fundamental physics.
Hosts: FQxI's Tejinder P. Singh and Michael Wright
Organized jointly by: Archive Trust for Research in Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy, Bristol, UK and Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, India.
Program advisors: Latham Boyle, Felix Finster, Niels Gresnigt, Cohl Furey, Jose Isidro, Roger Penrose, Basil Hiley, Ashutosh Kotwal, Anthony Lasenby, Hendrik Ulbricht.