Today I enjoyed a seminar on chiral p-wave superconductors. It sounds completely different from what superstring theory may be relevant with, but indeed it is not the case, that was really a fun. Well, probably people who are already familiar with superconductors know well about it, but it is again surprising to me that this superconductor exhibits a Chern-Simons gauge theory in 2 + 1 dimensions, and this theory is indeed familiar to superstring theorists: that is an effective theory for multiple M2-branes, proposed very recently. So, there is indeed a connection, at least at the level of effective theory and formality, between ultimate theory of the universe, M-theory, and the effective theory of a particular kind of superconductors. The similarity is not just the effective action, but indeed goes over to the physics of the theory. Of course today’s seminar, brought by a brilliant condensed matter theorist, did not give any relevance to M-theory, but the possibility is obvious to superstring theorists. Relevance to the massive photons really reminds me of the connection of M2-branes to D3-branes which I eventually worked on last year with my collaborators. This is quite fascinating.
The relevance goes over to a recent proposal of a holographic gravity description of superconductors. A gravity dual of p-wave superconductors was proposed by Gubser, and M-theory embedding of those kinds of holographic superconductors were worked out recently. This fascinating field has a lot of potential applicability of string theory techniques.
Today, I felt strongly that I need more interaction with condensed matter physicists, and a dawn of a new era of string theory “technology”.
