Relativistic Strings and Supergauges

Abstract

In these lectures I shall try to describe some work which has been done by a number of people over the past few years to give a description of the hadronic world [1], and some of their ramifications. The main point is that a field theory, such as a quark field theory with a gluon, even if it could be in principle correct, is hopelessly remote from the properties of hadrons one is interested in. This is so because in the strong interaction perturbation theory methods are unreliable (although recent ideas on asymptotic freedom may modify this situation) and also because what one wants is to calculate the entire spectrum of excitations and their interactions, a very difficult mathematical problem. It seems natural, therefore, to consider models which contain from the very beginning the entire spectrum of excitations as well as the main part of their interaction, so that higher order corrections may be expected to introduce only relatively small modifications. A possible approach of this type is the use of infinite component wave equations. Another possibility is to consider extended systems with internal excitations, such as the relativistic string described in the next section. Other extended systems could be the two-dimensional relativistic membrane or possibly a three-dimensional system with some kind of internal structure.