A Critique of Pure String Theory: Heterodox Opinions of Diverse Dimensions

By T. Banks. 2003

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I present a point of view about what M Theory is and how it is related to the real world that departs in certain crucial respects from conventional wisdom. I argue against the possibility of a background independent formulation of the theory, or of a Poincare invariant, Supersymmetry violating vacuum state. A fundamental assumption is black hole dominance of high energy physics.Much of this paper is a compilation of things I have said elsewhere. I review a crude argument for the critical exponent connecting the gravitino mass and the cosmological constant, and propose a framework for the finding a quantum theory of de Sitter space.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f790cbb459e6324495213614250b1d1068afaebd

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Citations in the corpus

Lectures on the Infrared Structure of Gravity and Gauge Theory (2017, methodology): “[187] T. Banks, “Current Algebra on the Conformal Boundary and the Variables of Quantum Gravity,” arXiv:1511.01147 [hep-th].”
Soft Hair on Black Holes. (2016, background): “However there are other soft symmetries such as superrotations [48, 49, 50, 11, 12] which lead to thicker kinds of hair as discussed in [10].”
Stringy corrections to Kahler potentials, SUSY breaking, and the cosmological constant problem (2004, background): “Banks [46] has argued, following [47] and [48], that transitions between supersymmetric AdS vacua are not possible because of a CdL-like bound, that transitions between nonsupersymmetric AdS vacua would likely lead to singular collapse, and that there are questions about the consistency of such tran”
2D Kac-Moody symmetry of 4D Yang-Mills theory (2015, background): “A salient feature (1)The results of [5,9,14,36,37] suggest that for quantum gravity scattering amplitudes the SL(2,C) Lorentz symmetry (1.”
Minimal Length Scale Scenarios for Quantum Gravity (2012, background): “Giddings and Thomas found an indication of how gravity prevents probes of distance shorter than the Planck scale [131] and discussed the ‘the end of short-distance physics’; Banks aptly named it ‘asymptotic darkness’ [47].”
Conserved charges of the extended Bondi-Metzner-Sachs algebra (2015, background): “[7] T. Banks, “A Critique of pure string theory: Heterodox opinions of diverse dimensions,” (2003), (see footnote 17), arXiv:hep-th/0306074 [hep-th].”
Asymptotic symmetries of Yang-Mills theory (2013, background): “In [2, 3] it was argued that this should be relaxed to allow for certain analytic singularities, or equivalently have holomorphic behavior on local patches of the conformal S(2).”
Asymptotic symmetries and electromagnetic memory (2015, background): “In the early 2000’s, it was suggested [3] that the globally defined BMS supertranslations could be accompanied by locally defined superrotations, extending the standard homogenous Lorentz group [4].”
Aspects of the BMS/CFT correspondence (2010, background): “In particular, a symmetry algebra of the kind that we derive and study here has been conjectured in [ 40 ].”
Asymptotic symmetries and celestial CFT (2020, methodology): “One of the key milestones from applying this paradigm is that it solidifies [8] a conjectured extension [9] of the BMS group to include superrotations [10–12], based on a newly discovered subleading soft graviton theorem [13].”
Superrotation charge and supertranslation hair on black holes (2016, background): “Early discussions of superrotation symmetry can be found in [114, 118, 119], and more recent ones in [7, 23, 24, 81, 82, 97, 98, 120].”
On BMS invariance of gravitational scattering (2013, background): “This is in harmony with the proposal of [9, 10], that this S(2) admits a Virasoro action.”
On the Geometry of the String Landscape and the Swampland (2006, unknown): “Similar ideas have been considered in [23,24].”
Evidence for a New Soft Graviton Theorem (2014, background): “It has been conjectured in [5, 6] that the BMS transformations should be infinitely extended to include all Virasoro transformations, i.”