It isn’t often that string theorists and particle physicists interested in phenomenology find themselves excited about the same body of work. But that’s what happened earlier this year at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, during a three-month long workshop on collider physics. “It’s the first time in living memory these two opposite wings of particle theory are collaborating on something real,” observed workshop participant and Fermilab theorist Joseph Lykken.
The work that has inspired the common interest centers around Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and several of his colleagues. Though perhaps best known as a string theorist, Witten began his career studying the deep inelastic scattering of leptons on nucleons. Last December, he discovered a remarkable connection between a certain type of string theory and the weak-coupling regime of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) probed by high-energy accelerator experiments. 1...