You may find this interesting and useful:

Enrico Fermi Institute Mini-Symposium: String Theory and Experiment

26 October 2001

http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~ste2001/

And these:

Scientists mount ambitious experiments, propose dramatic new theories about dark energy

South Pole Neutrino Detector Could Yield Evidences of String Theory

And this recent paper:

Paper (*cross-listing*): hep-th/0607092
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 07:22:29 GMT (292kb)

Title: Quantum Energies of Strings in a 2+1 Dimensional Gauge Theory

Authors: N. Graham, M. Quandt, O. Schroeder, H. Weigel

Comments: 26 pages, 20 eps-files combined to 8 figures
\\
We study classically unstable string type configurations and compute the
renormalized vacuum polarization energies that arise from fermion fluctuations
in a 2+1 dimensional analog of the standard model. We then search for a minimum
of the total energy (classical plus vacuum polarization energies) by varying
the profile functions that characterize the string. We find that typical string
configurations bind numerous fermions and that populating these levels is
beneficial to further decrease the total energy. Ultimately our goal is to
explore the stabilization of string type configurations in the standard model
through quantum effects.

We compute the vacuum polarization energy within the phase shift formalism
which identifies terms in the Born series for scattering data and Feynman
diagrams. This approach allows us to implement standard renormalization
conditions of perturbation theory and thus yields the unambiguous result for
this non--perturbative contribution to the total energy.

http://arXiv.org/abs/hep-th/0607092