Abstract
String theory started in the late 1960s as an attempt to organize and to explain the observed spectrum of hadrons and their interactions. It was then discarded as a candidate theory of strong interactions, a development which was mainly triggered by the rapid success of quantum chromodynamics. One problem was the existence of a critical dimension, which is 26 for the bosonic string and 10 for the fermionic string. Another obstacle for the interpretation of string theory as a theory of strong interactions was the existence of a massless spin two particle which is not present in the hadronic world.
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Blumenhagen, R., Lüst, D., Theisen, S. (2012). Introduction. In: Basic Concepts of String Theory. Theoretical and Mathematical Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29497-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29497-6_1
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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Online ISBN: 978-3-642-29497-6
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