22 - The string picture of the Veneziano model

Summary

Abstract

This Chapter is about my memories of the discovery that the Veneziano model in fact describes interacting strings. Susskind and Nambu also found the string picture by following other, independent approaches. A characteristic feature of my approach was that I used very highorder ‘fishnet’ or planar Feynman diagrams to describe the development of the relativistic string. The arrangement of particles on a chain indeed leads to the dominance of planar diagrams, if only nearest neighbour interactions are relevant. I also mention the work of Ziro Koba and myself on extending the Veneziano model, first to five external particles – as also done by Bardakci and Ruegg, Chan and Tsou, and Goebel and Sakita – and subsequently to an arbitrary number of external mesons.

Introduction

In the unpublished preprint [Nie70], ‘An almost physical interpretation of the integrand of the n-point Veneziano model’, I proposed – independently of Nambu [Nam70] and Susskind [Sus70a, Sus70b] – that the dual model or Veneziano model [Ven68] was describing the scattering of relativistic strings.

In the present Chapter I present my recollections on how I came to understand the scattering of strings in the Veneziano model. The background that led to the string idea can be found in the works with Ziro Koba that extended dual models to an arbitrary number of external particles [KN69a, KN69b, KN69c]. This work is described in Section 22.4. It would, however, be natural in such a reminiscence to describe first what for me was crucial, namely the seminar by Hector Rubinstein given at the Niels Bohr Institute.