Desperately Seeking Superstrings

We provide a detailed analysis of the problems and prospects of superstring theory c. 1986, anticipating much of the progress of the decades to follow.Comment: originally appeared as a Reference Frame in Physics Today, May 198

Exact chiral symmetry on the lattice and the Ginsparg-Wilson relation

It is shown that the Ginsparg-Wilson relation implies an exact symmetry of the fermion action, which may be regarded as a lattice form of an infinitesimal chiral rotation. Using this result it is straightforward to construct lattice Yukawa models with unbroken flavour and chiral symmetries and no doubling of the fermion spectrum. A contradiction with the Nielsen-Ninomiya theorem is avoided, because the chiral symmetry is realized in a different way than has been assumed when proving the theorem.Comment: plain tex source, 8 pages, no figure

Exact Supersymmetry on the Lattice

We discuss the possibility of representing supersymmetry exactly in a lattice discretized system. In particular, we construct a perfect supersymmetric action for the Wess-Zumino model.Comment: 9 pages, LaTex, no figure

Boundary Structure and Module Decomposition of the Bosonic Z2Z_2 Orbifold Models with R2=1/2kR^2=1/2k

The $Z_2$ bosonic orbifold models with compactification radius $R^2=1/2k$ are examined in the presence of boundaries. Demanding the extended algebra characters to have definite conformal dimension and to consist of an integer sum of Virasoro characters, we arrive at the right splitting of the partition function. This is used to derive a free field representation of a complete, consistent set of boundary states, without resorting to a basis of the extended algebra Ishibashi states. Finally the modules of the extended symmetry algebra that correspond to the finitely many characters are identified inside the direct sum of Fock modules that constitute the space of states of the theory.Comment: 28 page