The search for extra dimensions

The idea that the universe is trapped on a membrane in some high-dimensional space-time may explain why gravity is so weak, and could be tested at high-energy particle accelerators.

The possibility of extra dimensions, beyond the three dimensions of space of our everyday experience, sometimes crops up as a convenient, if rather vague, plot in science fiction. In science, however, the idea of extra dimensions has a rich history, dating back at least as far as the 1920s. Recently there has been a remarkable renaissance in this area due to the work of a number of theoretical physicists. It now seems possible that we, the Earth and, indeed, the entire visible universe are stuck on a membrane in a higher-dimensional space, like dust particles that are trapped on a soap bubble.

In this article we look at the major issues behind this new development. Why, for example, don't we see these extra dimensions? If they exist, how can we detect them? And perhaps the trickiest question of all: how did this fanciful idea come to be considered in the first place?

A long-standing idea

The whole notion of extra dimensions has its origin in the search for a unified theory of the forces observed in nature. The story began in the 1860s with the unification of the electric and magnetic forces by James Clerk Maxwell. As well as the extraordinary prediction that light is an electromagnetic wave, Maxwell's theory had a hidden property that was not realized until much later. It has what we now call a "gauge symmetry".

Gauge symmetry can be visualized in the following geometrical way. Suppose that every charged particle has associated with it an arrow that can rotate round in a circle like one of the hands of a clock. This rotation does not take place in the 3-D space that we observe, so the circle is - for the moment - purely mathematical, and the symmetry, known as U(1), is deemed "internal". The symmetry principle states that the absolute positions of these arrows can never be determined. Moreover, the symmetry is said to be "gauged" or "local" - meaning that the definition of absolute arrow position can change with time and location. Allowing such variations introduces a spurious current unless we add an extra ingredient to exactly compensate for it. This extra mathematical ingredient is the electromagnetic field.

The presence of this field explains the physical properties we associate with electromagnetism. For example, the field carries pulses of energy that we observe as particles of light - photons - and the exchange of photons results in the net electromagnetic force between charged particles.

In the 1920s Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism, together with Einstein's new general theory of relativity, inspired Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein to suggest that it might be possible to unify electromagnetism and gravity in an overarching geometrical scheme involving extra dimensions.

General relativity is a wonderful example of a geometrical theory. It too is derived from a local symmetry, known as Lorentz symmetry, that involves the four dimensions (three space plus one time) of everyday experience. In this case, velocities are like the arrows of the U(1) symmetry. So Lorentz symmetry incorporates the fact that the results from physical experiments are independent of the direction from which we view them and of our velocity. General relativity makes the symmetry local and, as for electromagnetism, that requires a field - which in this case is the geometry of space-time itself. Local "ripples" in space-time are the gravitational equivalent of photons - gravitons.

Figure 1

Inspired by this idea, Kaluza and Klein proposed including the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism into this geometric scheme by adding a fourth spatial dimension, giving a total of five. The 5-D space-time begins with the full 5-D Lorentz symmetry. However, if the extra dimension is curled up on itself, or "compactified", part of the symmetry is lost. What remains is precisely the 4-D Lorentz symmetry of general relativity and the U(1) gauge symmetry of electromagnetism. In this picture, the "internal space" of electromagnetism is actually a real extra dimension that is curled up, and the photon is really a component of the higher-dimensional graviton (see figure 1).

The Kaluza-Klein theory was a beautiful and audacious idea, and today seems remarkably prescient. Indeed, our modern geometric picture of gauge theories makes it seem almost natural. However, the Kaluza-Klein theory suffered from a number of serious faults. First, it failed to explain why the strength of the electromagnetic force is quite large while the gravitational force is fantastically weak. Second, quantum mechanics, which was developing rapidly at the time of Kaluza and Klein, could be incorporated into the theory of electromagnetism rather neatly, but not into the theory of gravity. Quantum gravity seemed to be plagued by infinities, which rendered calculations of physical processes useless. Finally, two more forces - the weak and strong forces - were discovered, and these did not seem to fit easily into the Kaluza-Klein picture.

Superstring theory: dimensions galore

Given some artistic licence, it is probably fair to say that interest in extra dimensions waned until the advent of supersymmetry and string theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Supersymmetry is a theory that relates the two different kinds of particles allowed by quantum mechanics - fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles that have half-integer values of intrinsic angular momentum or "spin", and include all the known particles of matter, such as electrons and protons. Meanwhile, bosons are particles with integer values of spin, including photons and gravitons.

Supersymmetry has a number of remarkable properties. In particular, it removes some of the infinities of quantum gravity. Moreover, the most symmetric forms of supersymmetry are naturally formulated in 10 or 11 dimensions.

Figure 2

String theories were a curiosity that had been around since the early 1970s. In these theories, the world is described by the interactions of 1-D objects called strings, rather than by the interaction of particles (figure 2). In string theory, the different "particles" can be thought of as different modes of vibration of the string. Moreover, there is one mode that has the properties of the graviton, which means that gravity is automatically included in the theory.

In the mid 1980s Michael Green, then at Queen Mary College in London, and John Schwarz of the California Institute of Technology, and others made a fortunate discovery. They realized that when supersymmetry and string theory are combined, the resulting "superstring" theory rather successfully incorporates quantum mechanics without the troublesome infinities, provided there are 10 space-time dimensions. So here, at last, was a candidate theory of quantum gravity - as long as we could accept that our apparently 4-D world has an extra six dimensions that are very tightly rolled up or compactified as in the old Kaluza-Klein idea.

Shortly after this breakthrough, a certain type of superstring theory - known as "heterotic" - became the focus of attention, since it possessed a gauge symmetry that was large enough to include all the known forces in a unified way.

These marvellous properties led to an explosion of interest. However, in a sense, string theory was a victim of its own theoretical success. There were simply far too many consistent solutions to the equations of string theory. Many of these solutions resembled our world, but many more did not. Worse, there was no dynamical mechanism that preferred one solution to any of the others, so string theory provided no explanation of the detailed properties of our world. It even failed to explain why the universe has three large space dimensions and not nine or ten. This problem, which is still with us today despite considerable progress, is called the "degeneracy problem".

There was another feature of heterotic string theories that was discouraging. General arguments suggested that it would probably never be possible to test string theory directly. These arguments involve dimensional analysis. For example, what is the typical size of a string - the so-called string length? Since string theory is a theory of quantum gravity, we can construct a unit of length l_Planck = (G_Nh-bar/c³)^1/2, where G_N is Newton's constant, h-bar is the Planck constant divided by 2 pi and c is the speed of light. Because gravity is such a weak force, this length turns out to be an extraordinarily small number, some 10^-35 m - about 10¹⁹ times smaller than an atomic nucleus. The energy we would need to probe such a small size is described in terms of the equivalent mass, known as the Planck mass. At 1.2 x 10¹⁹ GeV c^-2, the Planck mass is a dismayingly large number.

The huge Planck mass means that if such a string theory provides the correct description of quantum gravity, then everything we see today is essentially massless as far as the theory is concerned. String-theory effects would only show up if particle accelerators could reach Planck energies and "pluck" some of the higher modes of the string. Such high energies are some 10¹⁶ times higher than those that can be achieved at current particle accelerators and are almost certainly beyond our capabilities.

However, there are loopholes in these general arguments, which models constructed independently by Ignatios Antoniadis, then at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and Joe Lykken of Fermilab in the US tried to exploit in the early 1990s. In estimating the string length and the Planck mass, many theorists assumed that all the dimensionless parameters of the theory were of order one. In particular, this assumption led to the prediction that the typical size of the compactified extra dimensions is the same as the typical string scale.

However, Antoniadis and Lykken argued that the theory can dynamically generate very large or very small numbers as a consequence of the degeneracy problem. As a result, the size of the compactified extra dimensions could be much larger. And if they were large enough, string-theory effects would become visible at accessible energies.

Unfortunately, these early models of Antoniadis and Lykken had severe difficulty incorporating the three well-measured gauge forces - electromagnetism, the weak and the strong force - in a successful way. But they were important and interesting precursors to the more recent remarkable developments.

The world as a brane

Up to this point, people had assumed that gravity - together with the electromagnetic, strong and weak gauge forces - lives everywhere in 10-D space-time. However, a new possibility was brought to light in 1998 by Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, Savas Dimopoulos of Stanford University and Gia Dvali of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. They asked a rather general question: could gravity be the only force that is aware of extra dimensions? And if so, how large could the extra dimensions be?

Figure 3

If this were the case, the world would look as shown in figure 3. The electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, as well as all the matter in the universe, would be trapped on a surface with three spatial dimensions, like dust particles on soap bubbles. Only gravitons would be able to leave the surface and move throughout the full volume. This 3-D surface is known as a "brane", a name derived from membrane, the 2-D equivalent.

If the strong, electromagnetic and weak gauge forces are trapped on a brane, the answer to how large the "gravity-only" extra dimensions could be is surprising. Since we do not see extra dimensions in everyday life, we naturally assume that they must be tiny. However, our everyday experiences are prejudiced by electromagnetism, which is trapped on the brane. Meanwhile, the highest energy particle accelerators extend our range of sight to include the weak and strong forces down to small scales, around 10^-15 mm. We may therefore be blissfully unaware of any extra dimensions.

The only force we can use to probe gravity-only extra dimensions is, of course, gravity itself. Remarkably we have almost no knowledge of gravity at distances less than about a millimetre. This is because the direct tests of the gravitational force are based on torsion-balance experiments that measure the attraction between oscillating spheres (see Long et al. in further reading). The smallest scale on which this type of tabletop experiment has so far been performed is 0.2 mm.

Hence, below about 1 mm, objects could be gravitating in five or more dimensions. However, we know that the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces cannot be modified at distances larger than about 10^-15 mm. This prompted Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali to suggest that these forces might be trapped on a brane that has three spatial dimensions large enough to incorporate the entire visible universe, yet a "thickness" of at most 10^-15 mm in the extra-dimensional world.

Let's look in more detail at how forces behave in a brane world with a single extra dimension of size L. The electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, trapped within the 3-D brane, are not aware of the extra dimension and so maintain their usual behaviour. Gravity, on the other hand, behaves rather differently. If we approach a massive body closer than a distance L, we would feel the effects of a force law in four spatial dimensions rather than three. In this case, the gravitons from the massive body are spread over a 4-D sphere with radius r, the surface area of which grows as r³. We would then find that the gravitational force follows a 1/r³ law.

Figure 4

However, as we move further away from the body (i.e. r > L) the usual 1/r² behaviour is restored. The reason for this is as follows. Adding a compactified extra dimension is rather like standing between two mirrors; we see images of ourselves stretching to infinity. In the Arkani-Hamed-Dimopoulos-Dvali picture the same is true, except the images of the original brane are spaced every L apart and are only "seen" by the gravitational force (see figure 4).

Now consider the gravitational force coming from a massive body trapped in the brane. If we are much further away than L, then we are gravitationally attracted by the original body plus all its mirror images. When we are at a distance r > L along the brane from the original body, the gravitons from it and its infinite line of mirror images are spread out evenly over a 4-D "cylinder" of radius r, and the gravitational force follows the usual 1/r² behaviour. However, as a result of the initial higher-dimensional spreading, the force of gravity is much weaker than it would otherwise be.

In other words, the only reason the gravitational force appears to be so weak could be because it is diluted by the extra dimensions. This aspect of the world-as-a-brane scenario particularly interested Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali precisely because it reformulated the question of why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces (or equivalently, why the Planck energy of 10¹⁹ GeV is so much larger than the energy scale of weak interactions, around 1000 GeV).

In this picture, Newton's constant is a derived quantity that depends on the volume of the extra dimensions. When viewed from the higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk", there might be only one fundamental scale. The most radical suggestion lowers the fundamental scale of gravity to the weak energy scale, about 1000 GeV. This assumption leads to an estimate for the size of the extra dimensions in terms of their number, with higher numbers of extra dimensions implying smaller compactification scales.

If there is only one extra dimension then it turns out that it must be larger than the solar system and this possibility can be safely excluded. Two extra dimensions, on the other hand, give a compactification scale of roughly 1 mm, which is close to the current experimental limit. This experimental possibility is one of the most exciting aspects of the world-as-a-brane picture. Suddenly, from believing that a theory of quantum gravity would for ever be beyond the reach of experiments, it seemed as if we might be able to test the theory in tabletop experiments. Such experiments might show the usual Newtonian 1/r² force law switch to a 1/r⁴ law, which would characterize two extra dimensions.

The theoretical constructs necessary for the brane-world picture mirrored the developments that had been independently taking place in string theory. One aspect of these developments was the mathematical discovery that extended objects of various dimensionalities are integral to string theory. There turned out to be many well defined examples of such objects, generically called p-branes, where p is the number of spatial dimensions of the object. For example, a 0-brane is similar to a normal point-like particle, a 1-brane is like a string, a 2-brane resembles a membrane, and so on.

Figure 5

Intense interest was stimulated in p-branes following work in 1995 by Joe Polchinski of the University of California at Santa Barbara among others. String-theory p-branes are good candidates for brane worlds because they possess gauge symmetries on their "surfaces" and automatically incorporate a quantum theory of gravity, namely string theory. The gauge symmetry arises from "open" strings, strings that have their endpoints stuck on the brane. Meanwhile, two of these open strings can collide to form a loop of closed string that can travel into the higher-dimensional bulk (figure 5). The simplest excitation modes of these closed strings correspond precisely to gravitons.

The problems with branes

As an explanation of the weakness of gravity, the world-as-brane idea is striking. However, there are a number of problems and constraints, many of which were first pointed out by Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali. Many have to do with cosmology, some with astrophysics, and some problems are more aesthetic.

First, the naive statement that two extra dimensions, 0.2 mm in size, are allowed is not quite correct. Such large dimensions would significantly affect the behaviour of astrophysical objects, such as supernovae, because they would cause the object to lose energy by emitting gravitons into the bulk. This graviton emission would show up as an anomalous cooling of the objects' interiors. A precise calculation shows that the two extra dimensions must be smaller than the sub-millimetre size currently accessible in tabletop experiments.

However, the bulk almost certainly has other fields besides gravity. For example, if there are gauge fields in the bulk that are associated with "new forces", then their strength is predicted to be roughly a million times stronger than the gravitational force. It would therefore be possible to detect these stronger forces in tabletop experiments. In addition, gauge forces between like-charged objects are naturally repulsive, so we may even find that gravity seems to become repulsive on sub-millimetre distance scales.

Secondly, although it is inspired by particle physics, the world-as-a-brane picture has dramatic implications for the early evolution of the universe. Conversely, cosmology can place severe constraints on the brane picture. To understand why, recall that in the traditional cosmological view, what we see when we look at the sky today is the remnant of an earlier epoch when the universe was much smaller and hotter. Moreover, the traditional picture of the universe's evolution since the big bang is remarkably successful in many details. For example, it is possible to calculate the synthesis of the light elements - hydrogen, helium, deuterium, lithium and beryllium - using physics that is very well understood. The relative abundances of these light elements agree with measurements, provided that the universe evolved in a conventional way from temperatures below about 3 MeV. (Note that 1 MeV is approximately 10¹⁰ kelvin.) This poses a potential problem for the brane-world idea because of a striking new effect that limits how far back our universe can evolve normally.

If our universe, with its three spatial dimensions, is trapped on a brane then it could cool by emitting gravitons into the higher-dimensional bulk, just like a hot object - such as an ember from a fire - typically cools through the emission of infrared radiation in our 3-D world. In the conventional picture, this process does not occur since there is no space "outside" our universe into which the radiation can evaporate. However, for a brane world there are now two processes by which our world with its three spatial dimensions can cool: expansion, plus evaporation into the bulk.

Our conventional view of the evolution means that the first form of cooling should dominate. However, evaporative cooling prevailed at early times when the universe was very hot. Consequently there is a maximum temperature, T_*, above which the universe would have evolved in an unconventional way. Calculations show that T_* varies from about 1 MeV to 500 MeV as the number of extra dimensions increases from two to six. For two extra dimensions, this is below the temperature at which nucleosynthesis begins, which leads to an unacceptable modification of the light-element abundances.

One way around this is to raise the new fundamental scale of gravity above 1000 GeV, in which case the modification of the evolution of our universe is pushed to higher, and safer, temperatures.

Furthermore, such evaporation is dangerous for another reason. It fills the bulk with energetic gravitons, which can later decay into energetic photons on the brane, thus leading to an unacceptable distortion of the diffuse gamma-ray background that astronomers observe.

The upshot of this analysis is that the universe should never have had a temperature that exceeded about 1 GeV. Moreover, it is difficult, but not impossible, to accommodate the other necessary cosmological ingredients - including inflation and baryogenesis - in such a constrained scenario.

The quest for unification

The third problem is more aesthetic and has to do with the unification of the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces into a single force. One of the most successful and appealing aspects of the traditional view of the world at energy scales above 1000 GeV is that the full unification of these forces comes almost for free. Using conventional physics in 4-D space-time, we can predict how the strengths of the forces change as we increase the energy of an interaction. For example, in the supersymmetric version of the Standard Model - a collection of theories that describes our current understanding of the building blocks of matter and their interactions - the strengths of the three gauge forces become identical (or unify) when we extrapolate the energy to 10¹⁶ GeV.

In addition, this unification satisfies a number of non-trivial theoretical and experimental consistency tests. For example, it predicts one of the most important parameters of the Standard Model - the ratio of the strengths of weak interactions to electromagnetic ones. Furthermore, the scale of unification is high enough to prevent the decay of protons.

There are a number of extensions and refinements to this theory that also work well, and it is rather hard to give up this success. Does the would-be new paradigm do as well in this regard? Unfortunately, at the moment, the answer is no, but there are glimmers of hope.

At first glance, the success of the unification of forces seems to be absolutely destroyed by the world-on-a-brane picture. According to this theory, our usual description of the world would break down above 1000 GeV, the new fundamental scale of gravity, and the strengths of the forces would no longer evolve in a way that leads to successful unification.

One possibility emerged a few months after the appearance of Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali's paper. Keith Dienes, Emilian Dudas and Tony Gherghetta, then all based at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, suggested that the gauge forces can feel some extra dimensions, but not the very large ones that explain the weakness of gravity. They showed that in some cases it was possible to regain a different form of unification that now occurred close to the fundamental scale of gravity of 1000 GeV or above. The concern with this approach is that the calculations, and the possibilities for proton decay, are now very sensitive to the exact theory at the new fundamental scale of gravity, so reliable predictions are difficult to obtain. Also there was no explanation of why the unification of forces in the standard 4-D world was so successful. We are forced to assume that its success was just a lucky accident.

Another approach was initiated at roughly the same time by Antoniadis and by Costas Bachas at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and later developed by Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and one of us (JMR). The idea uses some special features of two large extra dimensions. The strengths of the gauge forces on a string-theory brane depend on the properties of the bulk. For two extra dimensions, the variation of this strength can mimic the way that the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces vary with energy in the supersymmetric version of the Standard Model. Thus in Antoniadis and Bachas's approach it might be possible to keep the attractive unification prediction of the standard approach and explain its success. However, no model has been constructed that is successful in detail.

New solutions to old problems

As well as these difficulties, however, the brane-world picture offers new solutions to old problems. One example is the dark-matter problem - why does most of the matter that gravitates in the universe seem to be invisible? (see Smith and Spooner in further reading). An interesting possibility raised by the brane-world proposal is that this mysterious form of matter is trapped on another brane. Such matter would be invisible since it can only communicate to us through the bulk via gravity. In particular, matter on a different brane cannot emit photons by which we could observe it. The existence of other parallel branes in the bulk is very natural, and indeed string theories typically require multiple sets of such branes.

The brane-world picture also offers an intriguing explanation for why the fundamental particles vary so widely in mass. Neutrinos, for example, seem to weigh less than a few electronvolts while other particles are over a billion times heavier. These ideas were originally suggested by Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos, Dvali and one of us (JMR) and also by Dienes, Dudas and Gherghetta. In these scenarios, the large size of the extra-dimensional bulk suppresses the interactions that give rise to particle masses. This suppression is possible if there are new fields, in addition to the graviton, that propagate in the bulk and do not feel the influence of the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces. In this picture, the observed neutrinos have such a small mass for precisely the same reason that gravity is very weak.

Finally, the most serious of all problems in particle physics and cosmology is the cosmological constant (see the article by Caldwell and Steinhardt, this issue). This term in Einstein's equations of general relativity is roughly a measure of the mass density of the vacuum. Although the cosmological constant is predicted by our current theories and by world-on-a-brane scenarios to be very large, nature appears to have tuned it to be incredibly small. In fact, the existence of a large long-lived universe demands that the cosmological constant is tiny. Consequently this number is the most constrained and the smallest constant in nature.

Explaining why the cosmological constant is so small has occupied cosmologists and particle physicists ever since Einstein first introduced it. Many proponents of the brane-world picture are tackling this problem again. One recent approach, motivated by a variation of the brane-world idea developed by Lisa Randall of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raman Sundrum of Boston University, is to look at branes in which the bulk dimensions are extremely curved or "warped", but not necessarily compactified. By warping the extra dimensions in the right way, it may be possible to explain why the cosmological constant appears to be so small.

Kaluza-Klein gravitons and black holes

What other experimental signatures might arise from our world being a brane embedded in a higher-dimensional space? One possibility is the appearance of new states, called Kaluza-Klein excitations, at high-energy colliders. These excited states are a feature of models with compactified dimensions, and can be understood by drawing an analogy with water.

Imagine a swimming pool that is infinitely long and just 1 mm wide. Not much use for swimming in admittedly, but the infinitely large side is a good analogy for the large dimensions we experience every day, while the short side is like a compactified dimension. Waves moving in the long direction can have any wavelength, and this is analogous to particles being able to take any energy. However, it is much harder to excite waves in the short direction. In fact, the waves must be smaller than 1 mm to exist at all. Shorter waves are more energetic, so a single wavelength of a 1 mm wave corresponds to the first Kaluza-Klein state, the next state has two 0.5 mm wavelengths and so on.

The large extra dimensions that are felt only by gravity can reveal themselves through the emission of gravitational Kaluza-Klein states into the bulk. This emission is another way of describing the process of graviton "evaporation". Moreover, because of the relatively large size of the extra dimension, the mass difference between one Kaluza-Klein state and the next is very small. There is therefore a huge number of such Kaluza-Klein excitations below the new fundamental scale of gravity. The combined effect of these excitations might be observable close to the new fundamental energy scale. If this fundamental scale is about 1000 GeV then we could see evidence for Kaluza-Klein states in experiments at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab or at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which will be completed in 2005.

A typical process might involve a proton and antiproton colliding to produce a single spray or jet of particles plus a graviton, which is emitted into the bulk. Since the energy of the graviton would be lost from our 4-D world, the telltale sign for such a process would be an excess of collisions with one jet and "missing" energy above the expectations of the Standard Model.

The particles that are confined to the brane also have Kaluza-Klein or higher string-excitation states, but for them the relevant scale (i.e. the width of the pool) is either the brane thickness or the new fundamental string scale. Both of these scales should correspond in energy to the new gravity scale of 1000 GeV or higher. The LHC could well produce fundamental string or brane relations of our familiar particles. For example, whole towers of Kaluza-Klein states that look like very heavy versions of electrons, photons and so on could be produced. Since these states feel the forces of the Standard Model they would be easy to detect, giving dramatic signals.

As yet, however, there is no evidence for Kaluza-Klein states up to energies of roughly 1000 GeV from high-energy colliders. And this is how we know that the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces do not feel extra dimensions.

Even more strikingly, due to the now much stronger gravitational interactions at short distances, there is also a slight possibility that microscopic black holes could be produced. Fortunately, such small black holes would quickly evaporate and would not be dangerous. In fact they would resemble exotic particles that decayed quite quickly. Nevertheless, it would be truly extraordinary if nature gave us the chance to study objects such as black holes directly in the laboratory.

About the author

Steven Abel is in the Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QJ, UK, e-mail s.a.abel@sussex.ac.uk. John March-Russell is in the Theory Division, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland, e-mail jmr@mail.cern.ch

Further reading

N Arkani-Hamed, S Dimopoulos and G Dvali 1998 The hierarchy problem and new dimensions at a millimeter Phys. Lett. B 429 263 J Ellis 1999 Particle physics: the next generation Physics World December pp43­48 J C Long, H W Chan and J C Price 1999 Experimental status of gravitational strength forces in the subcentimeter regime Nucl. Phys. B 539 23 N Smith and N Spooner 2000 The search for dark matter Physics World January pp23­28

Physicists find way to ‘see’ extra dimensions

Peering backward in time to an instant after the big bang, physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised an approach that may help unlock the hidden shapes of alternate dimensions of the universe.

A computer-generated rendering of a possible six-dimensional geometry similar to those studied by UW-Madison physicist Gary Shiu.

Image: courtesy Andrew J. Hanson, Indiana University

A new study demonstrates that the shapes of extra dimensions can be "seen" by deciphering their influence on cosmic energy released by the violent birth of the universe 13 billion years ago. The method, published today (Feb. 2) in Physical Review Letters, provides evidence that physicists can use experimental data to discern the nature of these elusive dimensions — the existence of which is a critical but as yet unproven element of string theory, the leading contender for a unified "theory of everything."

Scientists developed string theory, which proposes that everything in the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings of energy, to encompass the physical principles of all objects from immense galaxies to subatomic particles. Though currently the front-runner to explain the framework of the cosmos, the theory remains, to date, untested.

The mathematics of string theory suggests that the world we know is not complete. In addition to our four familiar dimensions — three-dimensional space and time — string theory predicts the existence of six extra spatial dimensions, "hidden" dimensions curled in tiny geometric shapes at every single point in our universe.

Don't worry if you can't picture a 10-dimensional world. Our minds are accustomed to only three spatial dimensions and lack a frame of reference for the other six, says UW-Madison physicist Gary Shiu, who led the new study. Though scientists use computers to visualize what these six-dimensional geometries could look like (see image), no one really knows for sure what shape they take.

The new Wisconsin work may provide a long-sought foundation for measuring this previously immeasurable aspect of string theory.

According to string theory mathematics, the extra dimensions could adopt any of tens of thousands of possible shapes, each shape theoretically corresponding to its own universe with its own set of physical laws.

For our universe, "Nature picked one — and we want to know what that one looks like," explains Henry Tye, a physicist at Cornell University who was not involved in the new research.

Shiu says the many-dimensional shapes are far too small to see or measure through any usual means of observation, which makes testing this crucial aspect of string theory very difficult. "You can theorize anything, but you have to be able to show it with experiments," he says. "Now the problem is, how do we test it?"

He and graduate student Bret Underwood turned to the sky for inspiration.

Their approach is based on the idea that the six tiny dimensions had their strongest influence on the universe when it itself was a tiny speck of highly compressed matter and energy — that is, in the instant just after the big bang.

"Our idea was to go back in time and see what happened back then," says Shiu. "Of course, we couldn't really go back in time."

Lacking the requisite time machine, they used the next-best thing: a map of cosmic energy released from the big bang. The energy, captured by satellites such as NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), has persisted virtually unchanged for the last 13 billion years, making the energy map basically "a snapshot of the baby universe," Shiu says. The WMAP experiment is the successor to NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) project, which garnered the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics.

Just as a shadow can give an idea of the shape of an object, the pattern of cosmic energy in the sky can give an indication of the shape of the other six dimensions present, Shiu explains.

To learn how to read telltale signs of the six-dimensional geometry from the cosmic map, they worked backward. Starting with two different types of mathematically simple geometries, called warped throats, they calculated the predicted energy map that would be seen in the universe described by each shape. When they compared the two maps, they found small but significant differences between them.

Their results show that specific patterns of cosmic energy can hold clues to the geometry of the six-dimensional shape — the first type of observable data to demonstrate such promise, says Tye.

Though the current data are not precise enough to compare their findings to our universe, upcoming experiments such as the European Space Agency's Planck satellite should have the sensitivity to detect subtle variations between different geometries, Shiu says.

"Our results with simple, well-understood shapes give proof of concept that the geometry of hidden dimensions can be deciphered from the pattern of cosmic energy," he says. "This provides a rare opportunity in which string theory can be tested."

Technological improvements to capture more detailed cosmic maps should help narrow down the possibilities and may allow scientists to crack the code of the cosmic energy map — and inch closer to identifying the single geometry that fits our universe.

The implications of such a possibility are profound, says Tye. "If this shape can be measured, it would also tell us that string theory is correct."

The new work was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Research Corp.

by Jill Sakai

The Man Who Found Quarks and Made Sense of the Universe

It is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.

Gell-Mann’s obsession with words dates to his youth, when his fascination with linguistics, natural history, and archaeology helped him understand the diversity of the world. The native New Yorker skipped three grades in elementary school and entered college early. After zipping through Yale and MIT, Gell-Mann was just 21 when he began his postdoc work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, back when Albert Einstein was still strolling the campus. Gell-Mann later worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, and he debated passionately with renowned physicist Richard Feynman during his many years at Caltech.

It was at Caltech that Gell-Mann helped to lay the foundations for our understanding of the components that make up matter. He drafted a blueprint of subatomic physics that he called the Eightfold Way. At the time, physicists understood that atoms are constructed from protons and neutrons, but they had also found many other mysterious particles. The Eightfold Way made sense of this baffling menagerie, finding within it places for particles never even imagined. The work was so important that it netted Gell-Mann a Nobel Prize in 1969.

In 1984 Gell-Mann pursued his dream of working in other fields by cofounding the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank where scientists are encouraged to cross disciplines. Located high on a hill in the New Mexico desert, surrounded by cottonwood trees and outcroppings of rose quartz, the institute is a place where an ornithologist can trade data over lunch with a political scientist while excitedly scrawling statistical equations on a window with a Sharpie for lack of paper and pen. With its geometric design, brightly colored walls, abundant hiking trails in the vicinity, and generous supply of candy in the kitchen, the Santa Fe Institute seems a bit like a playground for scientists.

DISCOVER contributing editor Susan Kruglinski recently sat with Gell-Mann among the oversize leather couches in the institute’s cozy library to talk about what it is like to have lived the history of modern physics.

You are best known as the person who discovered the quark, one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe, yet for years many of your colleagues weren’t convinced that quarks really existed. Why not?

You can’t see them directly. They have some unusual properties, and that’s why it was difficult for people to believe in them at the beginning. And lots of people didn’t. Lots of people thought I was crazy. Quarks are permanently trapped inside other particles like neutrons and protons. You can’t bring them out individually to study them. So they’re a little peculiar in that respect.

How should a nonphysicist visualize quarks? As tiny spheres trapped inside atoms?

Well, in classical physics you could think of a quark as a point. In quantum mechanics a quark is not exactly a point; it’s quite a flexible object. Sometimes it behaves like a point, but it can be smeared out a little. Sometimes it behaves like a wave.

When people picture particles smashing together in a particle collider, what should they be imagining? It’s not like billiard balls colliding, is it?

It depends on the circumstances. At very high energies, two particles that smash together do not bounce off each other but create a vast number of particles. You would have all sorts of little chips flying off in all directions—that would be a little more like it.

So it would be like smashing an apple and an orange together and getting bananas?

No, no, no. Little bits of all kinds of things. Getting a whole bunch of little chips of apple and orange, but also chips of banana and antibanana, grapes...

How many types of elementary particles are there?
We have a thing called the standard model, which is based on about 60 particles, but there may be many more. These are just the ones that have a low energy, so we can detect them.

The 1960s and 1970s could be considered a heyday of particle physics, when many subatomic particles—and not just elementary ones, it turns out—were being discovered. Could you talk a little bit about the events leading up to your discovery of the quark?
That was very dramatic for me. I had been working for years on the properties of particles that participated in the strong interaction. This is the interaction responsible for holding the nucleus of the atom together. The family of strongly interacting particles includes the neutrons and protons; those are the most familiar ones. But now tens, dozens, hundreds of other particles were being discovered in experiments in which protons collided with each other in particle accelerators. There were lots and lots of energy states in which we saw relatives—cousins—of the neutrons and protons.

These particles are similar to protons and neutrons but don’t normally exist in nature?
They are produced in a particle collision in an accelerator, and they decay after a short time. After a tiny fraction of a second, they fall apart into other things. One particle that I predicted, the omega-minus, can decay into a neutral pion and xi-minus, and then the pion decays into photons, and the xi-minus decays into a negative pion and a lambda. And then the lambda decays into a negative pion and a proton. The interior of the sun has a very high temperature, but even that very high temperature is not enough to make all of these things.

Do all these exotic particles exist anywhere outside of physics experiments?
They existed right after the Big Bang, when temperatures were incredibly high. And they occur in cosmic-ray events. [Cosmic rays themselves are mostly protons, but when they strike atomic nuclei in the earth’s atmosphere, these rare particles can be produced.]

But when you predicted the quark in 1964, you realized it was not just another “cousin” particle, right?
That’s right. Looking at the table of known particles and the experimental data, it was clear that the neutron and proton could be made up of three particles with fractional charges, which I called quarks. [Until then all known particles had charges that were a whole multiple of the charge in a proton.] Quarks were permanently confined in the neutron and proton, so you couldn’t pull them out to examine them singly. The neutron and proton were no longer to be considered elementary. It was not a difficult thing to deduce. What was difficult was believing it, because nobody had ever heard of making the neutron and proton composite. Nobody had ever heard of these fractional charges. Nobody had ever heard of particles being confined permanently inside observable things and not directly attainable.

As time goes on, physicists seem to find more and more particles. Could there be an infinite number of them?
All of us theorists believe in simplicity. Simplicity has always been a reliable guide to theory in fundamental physics. But the simplicity may not lie in the number of named particles. It may be that the theory, expressed simply, gives rise to huge numbers of particle types. The particles might go on forever, but you detect only the ones that are light enough to play a role in your experiments.

Now researchers are pinning a lot of hope on finding yet another set of predicted particles in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Do you think this will bring some clarity?
Well, there is another possibility, that they find some phenomenon that is utterly unexpected. It would upset us if they found something totally new, totally mystifying, but that’s what would be most exciting.

You were thought of as a math prodigy as a child, but math wasn’t your only passion, was it?
I remember when I was around 5, I looked through my father’s books. He had had a very substantial library, a huge library. And when the bad times struck—the Depression—he had to get rid of them when we moved to a tiny apartment. He had to have the furniture taken away. He couldn’t sell it; he had to pay to have it removed. He paid somebody five dollars to take away his library. Heartbreaking. But he had a few books left, 50 books or something like that. One of them was a book that gave etymologies of English words borrowed from Greek and Latin. So I learned all these Greek and Latin roots and how they went to make up English words. It was exciting. That started me on etymology, and I have loved etymology ever since.

I was always OK in math. Actually I loved math, loved studying it, loved using it. I loved history. I was particularly in love with archaeology and linguistics. And I could discuss anything with my brother—archaeology, etymology, anything at all. He never did anything with it, but he was very, very intelligent and very knowledgeable about all sorts of things. He was passionate about birds and other living things. Not so much the scientific principles of ornithology, but just seeing the birds and identifying them and knowing where they were, and what kind of nest they had, and what songs they sang. Going with him on a bird trip was the best thing—the best thing—I did in those years. My brother taught me to read from a cracker box when I was 3.

When you were going into college, you were interested in studying archaeology, natural history, or linguistics, but your father wanted you to make money as an engineer.
I said I’d rather be poor or die than be an engineer because I would be no good at it. If I designed something it would fall down. When I was admitted to Yale, I took an aptitude test, and when the counselor gave me the results of the exam, he said: “You could be lots of different things. But don’t be an engineer.”

Then how did you settle on physics?
After my father gave up on engineering, he said, ‘How about we compromise and go with physics? General relativity, quantum mechanics, you will love it.’ I thought I would give my father’s advice a try. I don’t know why. I never took his advice on anything else. He told me how beautiful physics would be if I stuck with it, and that notion of beauty impressed me. My father studied those things. He was a great admirer of Einstein. He would lock himself in his room and study general relativity. He never really understood it. My opinion is that you have to despise something like that to get good at it.

Why is that?
If you admire it sufficiently, you’ll be in awe of it, so you’ll never learn it. My father thought it must be very hard, and it will take years to understand it, and only a few people understand it, and so on. But I had a wonderful teacher at Yale, Henry Margenau, who took the opposite attitude. He thought relativity was for everybody. Just learn the math. He’d say, “We’ll prepare the math on Tuesday and Thursday, and we’ll cover general relativity on Saturday and next Tuesday.” And he was right. It isn’t that bad.

You’ve known some of the greatest physicists in history. Whom do you put on the highest pedestal?
I don’t put people on pedestals very much, especially not physicists. Feynman [who won a 1965 Nobel for his work in particle physics] was pretty good, although not as good as he thought he was. He was too self-absorbed and spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself. Fermi [who developed the first nuclear reactor] was good, but again with limitations—every now and then he was wrong. I didn’t know anybody without some limitations in my field of theoretical physics.

Back then, did you understand how special the people around you were?
No. I grew up thinking that the previous people were the special ones. Even though I knew most of them. I didn’t know Erwin Schrödinger [a pioneer of quantum mechanics]; I passed up a chance to meet him for some reason. But I did know Werner Heisenberg fairly well. He was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, which is one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. But by the time I knew him, although he was not extremely old, he was more or less a crank.

How so?
He was talking a lot of nonsense. He had things that he called theories that were not really theories; they were gibberish. His goal was to find a unified theory of all the particles and forces. He worked on an equation, but the equation didn’t have any practical significance. It was impossible to work with it. There were no solutions. It was just nonsense. Anyway, it was interesting that Wolfgang Pauli [discoverer of the exclusion principle], who did not go in for particularly crazy things—at least not in physics—was taken in by Heisenberg’s stuff for a little while. He agreed to join Heisenberg in his program.

But then Pauli came to the United States, where various people worked on him—including Dick Feynman, and including me. Many of us talked to Pauli and said, “Look, you shouldn’t associate yourself with this. It’s all rubbish, and you have your reputation to consider.” Pauli agreed, and he wrote a letter to Heisenberg saying something like: “I quit. This is all nonsense. There’s nothing to it. Take my name off.” In another letter, Pauli drew a rectangle on the page, and next to it he wrote: “This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing. W. Pauli.” In other words, Heisenberg had provided only a frame, with no picture. I knew Pauli fairly well. I knew Paul Dirac [another founder of quantum mechanics]. He was a remarkably eccentric person.

Of course I knew these people when they were old, not when they were young and carrying on their most important activities. But still, I knew them. And those were the people we were supposed to admire. I didn’t think the people around me were going to be so special. I guess, looking back now, the era does look exciting.

There’s a big difference, though, that my teacher Victor Weiskopf kept pointing out. And that is that the people who were working out the consequences of quantum mechanics, shortly after quantum mechanics was discovered in 1924 and ’25, began to understand how atoms and molecules really worked, and they asked elementary questions about the world that even ordinary people might ask. For example, Victor used to say, one question is, Why can’t I push one finger through the other finger? Well, ultimately it comes down to the exclusion principle [which shows that two particles cannot occupy the same space at the same time]. And so on. Whereas now you have to be sophisticated to even ask the questions that we’re answering.

One of your best-known interactions was with Richard Feynman at Caltech. What was that like?
We had offices essentially next door to each other for 33 years. I was very, very enthusiastic about Feynman when I arrived at Caltech. He was much taken with me, and I thought he was terrific. I got a huge kick out of working with him. He was funny, amusing, brilliant.

What about the stories that you two had big problems with each other?
Oh, we argued all the time. When we were very friendly, we argued. And then later, when I was less enthusiastic about him, we argued also. At one point he was doing some pretty good work—not terribly deep, but it was very important—on the structure of protons and neutrons. In that work he referred to quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, of which they were made, but he didn’t call them quarks, antiquarks, and gluons. He called them “partons,” which is a half-Latin, half-Greek, stupid word. Partons. He said he didn’t care what they were, so he made up a name for them. But that’s what they were: quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, and he could have said that. And then people realized that they were quarks, and so then you had the “quark-parton” model. We finally constructed a theory—I didn’t do it by myself; it was the result of several of us put together. We constructed the right theory, called Quantum Chromodynamics [QCD], which I named. [QCD describes the interactions between quarks and gluons, which bind quarks together.] And Feynman didn’t believe it.

He didn’t believe that the theory was correct?
No. He had some other cuckoo scheme based on his partons. Finally after a couple of years he gave up because he was very bright and realized after a while that we were correct. But he resisted it, and I didn’t understand why he had to be that way. Partons...

Feynman was famously eccentric. Did you guys ever do anything wacky together?
We did lots of playful things. One of his friends was an elderly Armenian painter. My late wife Margaret and I were friendly with him too. He had some important birthday, and Margaret and I dreamed up this idea of giving him a peacock. So we conspired with the Feynmans to do it. They drew his attention somewhere else while Margaret and I got the peacock from the car and put it in his bedroom. A peacock in his bed! It’s a marvelous way to give somebody a present.

Did you find it strange that Feynman became such a celebrity?
Feynman was a peculiar case because he was a very brilliant, terrific, successful scientist, but he was also a clown. He was more of a clown than he was a scientist sometimes.

But you and Feynman could get into really deep conversations about physics. You were well matched, weren’t you?
For some years, and then I got fed up with him. He was just so turned in on himself. Everything was a test of his brilliance. So if in discussing things we came to some interesting conclusion, his interpretation of it was, “Gee, boy, I’m smart.” And it’s just annoying, so after a few years I just wouldn’t work with him.

When you think about people like Feynman or Einstein or some of the other physics legends, do you think of them as geniuses? Is there such a thing?
Einstein was very special—I mean, creating that theory, general relativity [which describes gravity as a product of the geometry of space and time]. To do it today or to do it 34 years ago would be striking, remarkable, an utterly remarkable achievement. But to do it when he did, in 1915, that’s just unbelievable.

When you were at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein was also there, although he was near the end of his life. Were you able to absorb anything from him?
I could have. I could have made an appointment with his secretary, the formidable Helen Dukas, and gone in and talked with him. I could have asked him some questions about the old days. If it were today I would do it in a moment. But all I could see then was that he was past it. He didn’t believe in quantum mechanics, didn’t know about the particles that we were studying. And he didn’t know about this and that. If I showed him what I was doing, he wouldn’t make anything of it. And if he showed me what he was doing, I wouldn’t believe it. So I didn’t do anything. I would say: “Hello. Good morning.” And he would say, “Guten morning.” That was about it.

What are you working on today?
Along with several other people around the world, I’m looking to see if there might be alternate ways to mathematically characterize entropy, the measure of disorder of a system. It might be useful to employ alternate formulas for looking at different circumstances such as financial markets or social interactions. Maybe this will turn out to be an extremely flexible tool for handling all kinds of situations. That’s what people hope. Other people think it’s nuts.