Dresden 2000 – scientific programme

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PV: Plenarvorträge

PV IV

PV IV: Plenary Talk

Tuesday, March 21, 2000, 09:00–09:45, H 01

The Smallest structures — •Gerard ’t Hooft — Spinoza Institut, Utrecht, Niederlande

The Standard Model for the elementary particles has scalar fields, spinor fields and vector fields as its fundamental degrees of freedom. The ways in which these fields can be coupled are severely restricted, and to these restrictions the model owes its predictive strength. This success is due to the fact that models were searched for in which the short distance behaviour is as simple as popssible, so that requirements concerning causality and unitarity could be met. This is also the reason why the Standard Model is renormalizable.

By restricting the short distance behaviour such that more demands are obeyed, further adjustments to the Standard model can be predicted, such as super symmetry. However, the theories presently proposed for the addition of tyhe gravitational force do not yet meet the severest demands. By further studying the short distance behaviour of the super string theories and improving the formalism in that respect, one may well discover considerable improvements.