First superstring revolution
|
|
In physics, the first superstring revolution is a period of important discoveries in string theory roughly between 1984 and 1986. The physicists realized that string theory was capable to describe all elementary particles and interactions between them, and hundreds of them started to work on string theory as the most promising idea to unify theories of physics. The revolution was started by a discovery of anomaly cancellation in type I string theory by Michael Green and John Schwarz in 1984. The anomaly is cancelled due to the Green-Schwarz mechanism. Several other ground-breaking discoveries, such as the heterotic string, were made in 1985. It was also realised in 1985 that to obtain <math>N=1<math> supersymmetry, the six small extra dimensions need to be compactified on a Calabi-Yau manifold.