{"id":474,"date":"2006-10-12T21:52:27","date_gmt":"2006-10-13T01:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=474"},"modified":"2006-11-07T16:05:17","modified_gmt":"2006-11-07T20:05:17","slug":"links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=474","title":{"rendered":"Links"},"content":{"rendered":"

This evening a very interesting paper appeared on the arXiv, entitled Instantons Beyond Topological Theory I<\/a> by E. Frenkel, Losev and Nekrasov. The authors are studying theories with a topological sector (supersymmetric quantum mechanics and 2d sigma models on a Kahler manifold, N=2 supersymmetric YM in 4d), but are interested in sectors of the theories that are not purely topological. I’m looking forward to reading the paper over the next few days, but it is a bit daunting. This paper is nearly 100 pages long, and it is only part I of three parts, and actually just the simplest part, that involving quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n

HEPAP is meeting today and tomorrow, here’s the agenda<\/a>. From the slides of the talk about NASA, the budget situation there for fundamental science missions doesn’t look good, and there is discussion of the upcoming NRC committee charged with figuring out which of the “Beyond Einstein” missions to allow to go forward. At Dynamics of Cats, Stein Sigurosson has been writing<\/a> about this in terms of the missions being sent to Thunderdome, only one to emerge alive.<\/p>\n

Slides from the talks last month at the conference in honor of Nigel Hitchin’s 60th birthday are available<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Joe Lykken has a nice review article<\/a> about the standard model, in which he notes:<\/p>\n

There is only one diagonal Yukawa coupling that is of order one, and that is the top quark Yukawa. But even this case is mysterious. The top Yukawa is not really <\/em>of order one: it is equal to one! For example, using the 2005 combined Tevatron value for the pole mass of the top quark, the corresponding Yukawa coupling is 0.99 +\/- 0.01. The entire particle physics community has chosen (so far) to regard this fact as a 1 per cent coincidence. I should point out that similar percent level equalities, e.g. supersymmetric gauge coupling unification or the ratio of the total mass-energy density of the universe to the critical density, have spawned huge theoretical frameworks bolstered by thousands of papers.<\/em><\/p>\n

Difference is that, as far as I know, nobody has an idea why this Yukawa coupling should be one. Maybe this is a big clue…<\/p>\n

Over at Backreaction, there’s an excellent posting about Does String Theory Explain Heavy Ion Physics?<\/a>, one of the very few places to find a non-overhyped discussion of this topic.<\/p>\n

Davide Castelvecchi has a well-done review<\/a> of my book at his sciencewriter.org web-site.<\/p>\n

At this week’s physics colloquium at Penn, Andre Brown reports<\/a> that Robert Cahn emphasized that “half the particles needed for supersymmetry have already been discovered.” He also recalled a quote from another colloquium about supersymmetry: “Supersymmetry has stood the test of time. There is no evidence for supersymmetry.”<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: A couple people have pointed out the following rather accurate cartoon<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This evening a very interesting paper appeared on the arXiv, entitled Instantons Beyond Topological Theory I by E. Frenkel, Losev and Nekrasov. The authors are studying theories with a topological sector (supersymmetric quantum mechanics and 2d sigma models on a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}