The Catenary Revisited: From Newtonian Strings to Superstrings

The dynamics of extended objects, such as strings and membranes, has attracted more attention in the past decades since the fundamental objects introduced in high-energy physics are no longer pointlike. Their motion is generally quite intricate to describe and usually requires the sophisticated tools of Conformal Field Theory, Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity. This article argues that the Newtonian analogy of a catenary with free ends offers a good description of some processes such as gravitational radiation by an accelerated brane.