Book Description

The relativistic string theory was born in 1960s. The stimulus was an observation that the dual model of hadronic interactions proposed by Veneziano is adequate not to the quantum theory of usual (null-dimensional) particles but to the theory of one-dimensional relativistic objects -- the strings. It has been immediately found that a self-consistent quantum theory of (bosonic) relativistic strings can be constructed in frames of standard quantisation scheme only in a space-time of dimension 26. Inclusion of fermions has decreased this critical dimension to 10. However, it is evident from the experiment, that elementary particles and their constituents 'live' in the space-time of dimension 4. The attempt to show that extra 6 dimensions are compactified on the scale of Planck's length, in the spirit of old ideas by Kaluza-Klein, just created further complications. This book differs from traditional presentations of the classical and quantum theory of relativistic strings by two aspects. First, it proposes and consistently implements an idea of mathematical modelling and computer visualisation of topologically non-trivial solutions of the classical equations of motion of relativistic strings. Second, on this basis it successfully implements a quantisation scheme, originating from the papers by G P Pron'ko, which uses a different set of dynamical variables, canonically equivalent to the variables of standard scheme, in frames of Hamiltonian formalism and Dirac's quantisation procedure.