Comments On String Theory

TL;DR

This paper discusses the implications of string theory, supersymmetry, and magnetic monopoles for particle physics and cosmology, highlighting potential experimental tests and the significance of extra dimensions.

Contribution

It provides a critical overview of how string theory and supersymmetry relate to observable phenomena and cosmological implications, emphasizing the role of magnetic monopoles and extra dimensions.

Findings

Supersymmetry is relevant at energies close to current accelerators.

Magnetic monopoles are predicted to exist if string theory is correct.

Extra dimensions could lower monopole masses to accessible energy scales.

Abstract

String theory avoids the ultraviolet infinities that arise in trying to quantize gravity. It is also more predictive than conventional quantum field theory, one aspect of this being the way that it contributed to the emergence of the concept of ``supersymmetry'' of particle interactions. There are hints from the successes of supersymmetric unified theories of particle interactions that supersymmetry is relevant to elementary particles at energies close to current accelerator energies; if this is so, it will be confirmed experimentally and supersymmetry is then also likely to be important in cosmology, in connection with dark matter, baryogenesis, and/or inflation. Magnetic monopoles play an important role in the structure of string theory, and thus should certainly exist, if string theory is correct, though they may have been diluted by inflation to an unobservable level. The monopole mass in many attractive models is near the Planck mass, but, if unification of elementary particle forces with gravity occurs near TeV energies through large or warped extra dimensions, as in some recent models, then monopoles should be below 100 TeV and in an astrophysical context would be ultrarelativistic. In such models, supersymmetry would definitely be expected at TeV energies.