Project Data

The project's title is ``Teoria dei campi, superstringhe e supergravita'' and it is financed by the MIUR with contract no. 2001-1025492.

Project Overview

This project comprises essentially all Italian groups doing fundamental research in the domain of string theory in its broad and modern sense, that is in superstrings, supergravity, supersymmetric gauge theories, brane physics, quantum gravity, conformal field theories and non-commutative geometry. There are nine teams involved in this project. Three of them are based in three independent universities of the same region and present a research program with many common parts due to the strong connections among them. Two other nodes are located in two universities of the same city, and they too share some common parts in their research program. There are also a few individual researchers from other institutions that have been included on a personal basis. It is therefore fair to say that this project, if selected, will realize an Italian network in string theory. The scientific basis for proposing such a project is represented by the long-standing research tradition of the various teams which goes back to the seventies and eighties when the senior researchers gave remarkable and widely recognized contributions towards the formulation of consistent superstring theories, of supergravity models in various dimensions and of supersymmetric field theories in general, which are now at the basis of most scenarios for physics beyond the Standard Model. This tradition is maintained nowadays also with significant contributions of younger researchers. Our project will be mainly devoted to the study of string theory, which at the moment is the only candidate for a theory that unifies all fundamental interactions including gravity. This subject is not only of great intrinsic intellectual interest but has also many ramifications across a wide area of theoretical physics and mathematics. The main objectives that will be pursued with this project are:

• Study of the AdS/CFT correspondence and of gauge/gravity dualities in general, the ultimate goal being the understanding of non-supersymmetric and confining QCD-like theories on the one hand, and of quantum gravity on the other.
• Analysis of dynamical properties of the dual gauge theories using boundary conformal field theories on curved backgrounds.
• Study of mechanisms of supersymmetry breaking using non-BPS branes or configurations that exhibit the brane supersymmetry breaking which have also interesting applications to model building, in particular in scenarios with large extra dimensions.
• Study of the role and the fate of tachyonic excitations in non-supersymmetric configurations of string theory and analysis of the mechanism of tachyon condensation.
• Study of brane-world scenarios, warped compactifications and domain wall solutions in supergravity.
• Analysis of non-commutative geometry and of the properties of quantum field theories in non-commutative spaces. This project consists mainly in the construction and elaboration of models and in their theoretical analysis. This is a rapidly evolving area of research which requires close contact and frequent interactions among scientists. Thus, to increase the existing collaborations and encourage the exchange of ideas, we plan to organize common activities, as for example informal workshops.

Further Information

Further information are available on

• project's target;
• Universities participating to our cofin;
• meetings, workshops and school organized and/or cofinanced;
• publications from our project;
• seminars held at the institutions in this project.