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LMS SPITALFIELDS DAY REPORT
On Monday 8 October a Spitalfields Day event on Gauge Theory, String Theory and Unification was held at the Isaac Newton Institute (INI), Cambridge, as part of the six-month Strong Fields, Integrability and Strings programme taking place there. The audience of 70, drawn both from INI programme participants and visitors for the day, heard four talks from leading researchers in particle physics theory, reviewing our prospects for learning about fundamental physics at the smallest scales, via both collider experiments and recent progress in the mathematics underlying gauge field theory and string theory. Nick Evans of Southampton University opened proceedings by previewing CERN's Large Hadron Collider – "the greatest experiment on Earth" – due to start taking data at CERN next year and offering the best chance for fundamental discovery in a generation. He was followed by Mikhail Shifman from the University of Minnesota, who explained supersymmetry (SUSY), viewed by many particle theorists as the most elegant solution to several outstanding problems such as the large separation between electroweak and Planck energy scales, and the origin of 'dark matter'. Should SUSY be discovered at LHC, Professor Shifman stressed the tremendous breakthrough in understanding that would result – the universe would have to be rethought in terms of extra 'quantum dimensions'. After tea, Niall MacKay made a short presentation on behalf of a much-missed colleague whose memory is celebrated via the Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture Fund (www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/about/andrew-chamblin.html), before introducing Alexander Gorsky of the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow, who reviewed the remarkable role integrability is playing in our understanding of many quantum systems including quantum gravity, topological field theory, and SUSY Yang-Mills theory.
Simon Hands
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