STRINGS AND THE ADVENT OF SUPERSYMMETRY: THE VIEW FROM PASADENA
These excerpts are based on the interview conducted by Melitta Fitzer and T. Shifman, Santa Barbara, November 19, 1999 (the transcript was prepared by A. Roitman), and on a private letter from J. Schwarz to G.L. Kane.
Q. To warm up I would like to ask how your early work was related to supersymmetry.
A. The earliest version of string theory (developed in the late 1960's to describe hadron interactions) suffered from various unphysical features. In particular, the spectrum contained a tachyon but no fermions. This motivated the search for a more realistic string theory. The first significant success was made in January 1971 by Pierre Ramond1 who constructed a string analog of the Dirac equation. At about the same time, Andre Neveu and I were in Princeton constructing a new bosonic string theory. Neveu and I quickly realized2 that the two constructions were different facets of a single theory and (along with Charles Thorn) we constructed3 an interacting string theory containing our bosons and Ramond's fermions. In 1972 I showed that consistency of the theory requires that the space-time dimension is 10 and that the ground state fermions are massless…
