Research in particle theory: Annual progress report, January 1, 1988--November 20, 1988

Heterotic parastrings in six and four space-time dimensions were constructed, which have gauge groups E8 and spin 8/Z2, respectively. Parafermion theories of order Q in two dimensions were constructed and shown to be related to but not identical with fermion theories with an SO(Q) symmetry. Compactification schemes were studied in which E8 /times/ E8 is a connection on a holomorphic vector bundle V, with the same Chern class as the tangent bundle, and the field equations were solved perturbatively. It was shown that supersymmetry could be maintained to second order. A particular family of solutions of Einstein's field equations with toroidal topology was found that contains Schwarzchild, Curzon, Back-Weyl, and gamma-metric solutions as special cases. Dynamical models of electro-weak symmetry breaking have been studied. Mechanisms for suppressing flavor changing neutral current amplitudes endemic to such models have been proposed. The impact of new interactions that appear at very high energies on spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking has been investigated. These interactions can enhance the chiral condensate and the Goldstone boson decay constant relative to the confinement scale leading to interesting phenomenology in technicolor models even below the weak interaction scale. The modular covariant partition functions were given in twisted sectors of conformal field theories with Z/sub n/ symmetries for theories with central charge c = 1 and c < 1. Bosonizable conformal energy tensors were investigated. The g/U(1)/sup r/ parafermionic theories of Fateev, Zamolodchikov and Gepner were bosonized. Additions of terms linear in a Kac-Moody algebra to the Virasoro algebra were shown to generate new conformal field theories with continuously changing central charge. 49 refs