Twistor theory was proposed by Roger Penrose in 1967 as a possible path to quantum gravity and has evolved into a branch of theoretical and mathematical physics. Penrose proposed that twistor space should be the basic arena for physics from which space-time itself should emerge. It leads to a powerful set of mathematical tools that have applications to differential and integral geometry, nonlinear differential equations and representation theory and in physics to relativity and quantum field theory, in particular to scattering amplitudes.
In mathematics, conformal geometry is the study of the set of angle-preserving (conformal) transformations on a space.
In theoretical physics, supergravity is a modern field theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity; in contrast to non-gravitational supersymmetric theories such as the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Supergravity is the gauge theory of local supersymmetry. Since the supersymmetry (SUSY) generators form together with the Poincaré algebra a superalgebra, called the super-Poincaré algebra, supersymmetry a gauge theory makes gravity arise in a natural way.
Michael James Duff FRS, FRSA is a British theoretical physicist and pioneering theorist of supergravity who is the Principal of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Abdus Salam Chair of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London.
In theoretical physics, the Weyl transformation, named after Hermann Weyl, is a local rescaling of the metric tensor:
In general relativity, the pp-wave spacetimes, or pp-waves for short, are an important family of exact solutions of Einstein's field equation. The term pp stands for plane-fronted waves with parallel propagation, and was introduced in 1962 by Jürgen Ehlers and Wolfgang Kundt.
A conformal anomaly, scale anomaly, or Weyl anomaly is an anomaly, i.e. a quantum phenomenon that breaks the conformal symmetry of the classical theory.
Conformal gravity are gravity theories that are invariant under conformal transformations in the Riemannian geometry sense; more accurately, they are invariant under Weyl transformations where is the metric tensor and is a function on spacetime.
A (pseudo-)Riemannian manifold is conformally flat if each point has a neighborhood that can be mapped to flat space by a conformal transformation.
Joël Scherk, often cited as Joel Scherk, was a French theoretical physicist who studied string theory and supergravity.
Tamiaki Yoneya is a Japanese physicist.
The non-critical string theory describes the relativistic string without enforcing the critical dimension. Although this allows the construction of a string theory in 4 spacetime dimensions, such a theory usually does not describe a Lorentz invariant background. However, there are recent developments which make possible Lorentz invariant quantization of string theory in 4-dimensional Minkowski space-time.
Sergio Ferrara is an Italian physicist working on theoretical physics of elementary particles and mathematical physics. He is renowned for the discovery of theories introducing supersymmetry as a symmetry of elementary particles and of supergravity, the first significant extension of Einstein's general relativity, based on the principle of "local supersymmetry". He is an emeritus staff member at CERN and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Higher-dimensional supergravity is the supersymmetric generalization of general relativity in higher dimensions. Supergravity can be formulated in any number of dimensions up to eleven. This article focuses upon supergravity (SUGRA) in greater than four dimensions.
Gregory Winthrop Moore is an American theoretical physicist who specializes in mathematical physics and string theory. Moore is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of Rutgers University and a member of the University's High Energy Theory group. He is married to Karin Rabe, and son of Arthur Cotton Moore.
In two spatial and one time dimensions, general relativity turns out to have no propagating gravitational degrees of freedom. In fact, it can be shown that in a vacuum, spacetime will always be locally flat. This makes (2+1)-dimensional topological gravity a topological theory with no gravitational local degrees of freedom.
This page is a glossary of terms in string theory, including related areas such as supergravity, supersymmetry, and high energy physics.
Peter Christopher West, born on 4 December 1951, is a British theoretical physicist at King's College, London and a fellow of the Royal Society.
In theoretical physics, the dual graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that is a dual of the graviton under electric-magnetic duality, as an S-duality, predicted by some formulations of supergravity in eleven dimensions.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
