Elementary Particle Theory

理论粒子物理学的研究将主要朝两个方向进行。多年来，理论家们一直对引力在高能物理中许多微观粒子的相互作用中所起的作用以及如何将所有的自然力与引力统一起来深感兴趣。理解这一点的主要理论是弦理论。弦是延展的物体，其不同的振荡描述了不同的粒子。弦是一维物体，而像膜这样的二维物体和更高维度的被称为“膜”的物体可以存在，并且被认为在统一力的过程中起着基本的作用。这个描述自然力的框架将得到进一步发展，而爱因斯坦的广义相对论是如何从广义统一中产生的这一重要问题也将得到研究。人们普遍认为，目前已知的低能量下的物理定律将在高能量下被修正。在接下来的五年里，高能加速器，探测宇宙中暗物质的实验，以及宇宙学的卫星实验将能够验证这一点。关于这些新定律的本质可能是什么，现在有几个主要的建议，研究将进行，以确定这些实验中可能出现的信号，这些信号将使我们能够从实验中推断出新的自然基本定律。

Research in theoretical particle physics will proceed in two main directions. For a number of years now, theorists have been deeply interested in the role that gravity plays in the interaction of the many microscopic particles of high energy physics and how one may unify all the forces of nature with gravity. A leading theory to understand this is string theory. Strings are extended objects whose different oscillations describe the different particles. Strings are one dimensional objects, and two dimensional objects such as membranes and even higher dimensional objects called "branes" can exist and are believed to play a fundamental role in unifying the forces. This framework for describing the forces of nature will be developed further and the important issue of seeing how Einstein's theory of general relativity emerges from the general unification will be investigated.It is generally believed that the laws of physics will be modified at higher energies from the currently known laws that hold at low energies. Over the next five years, high energy accelerators, experiments to detect the dark matter in the universe, and satellite experiments on cosmology will be able to test this. There are now several leading proposals as to what the nature of these new laws might be, and research will be carried out to determine the signals that might show up at these experiments that will allow us to infer from the experiments the new fundamental laws of nature.