Maximally Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory: The Story of N= 4 Yang-Mills Theory

摘要

1. History All roads lead to Rome. This historic saying is also true in fundamental physics where the Milliarium Aureum is the Yang-Mills Theory. This was not at all obvious fifty years ago. The particle physics of the 1960's was dominated by the efforts to find the theory for the strong interactions. The domineering figure was Murray Gell-Mann who also got his Nobel Prize in 1969 for "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions". He introduced the SU (3) flavor symmetry in 1961 to classify the strongly interacting particles~1 and and a few years later the quarks.~2