Related papers: The Geometer's Toolkit to String Compactifications
These condensed notes treat some basic notions in Tropical Geometry (varieties, cycles, modifications, equivalence). These topics are to be extended, illustrated and included to the upcoming book project…
The purpose of this note is to exhibit some simple and basic constructions for smooth compact transformation groups, and some of their most immediate applications to geometry.
These are notes from an informal mini-course on factorization homology, infinity-categories, and topological field theories. The target audience was imagined to be graduate students who are not homotopy theorists.
This review is devoted to open strings, and in particular to the often surprising features of their spectra. It follows and summarizes developments that took place mainly at the University of Rome ``Tor Vergata'' over the last decade, and…
The stabilization of moduli is one of the main problems in string theory. In this talk I will discuss some stringy mechanisms based on non-geometrical compactifications to obtain four dimensional models with a reduced number of moduli.
The aim of this short lecture series is to expose the students to the beautiful theory of lattices by, on one hand, demonstrating various basic ideas that appear in this theory and, on the other hand, formulating some of the celebrated…
We study the field theory localizing to holomorphic maps from a complex manifold of complex dimension 2 to a toric target (a generalization of A model). Fields are realized as maps to $(\mathbb{C}^*)^N$ where one includes special…
The purpose of this note is to provide a short invitation to the universal algebraic approach to topological string theory. In the first section we make an attempt to explain the origin of this approach and how it fits into the bigger…
In this thesis we will discuss various aspects of noncommutative geometry and compactified Little-String theories. First we will give an introduction to the use of noncommutative geometry in string theory. Thereafter we will present a proof…
This is a one semester course on bosonic string theory aimed at beginning graduate students. The lectures assume a working knowledge of quantum field theory and general relativity. Contents: 1. The Classical String 2. The Quantum String 3.…
Symplectic and Poisson geometry emerged as a tool to understand the mathematical structure behind classical mechanics. However, due to its huge development over the past century, it has become an independent field of research in…
It is hoped that these lectures will give a point of entry into that vast web of related ideas that go under the name "string theory". I start with a more or less qualitative introduction to gravity as a field theory and sketch how one…
The aim of these notes is to give recent developments in string theory. In particular, we discuss the string spectrums, compactifications, brane physics and dualities.
These lectures provide a self-contained introduction to flux compactifications of type IIB string theory on Calabi-Yau orientifolds. The first lecture begins with geometric foundations, then presents vacuum solutions in Calabi-Yau…
In these lectures, we review the main properties of the topological theory obtained by twisting the N=2 two-dimensional superconformal algebra, associated to supersymmetric string compactifications. In particular, we describe a set of…
A field theory approach to summing threshold effects to the gauge couplings in a two-torus compactification is presented and the link with the (heterotic) string calculation is carefully investigated. We analyse whether the complete UV…
This text is a slightly edited version of lecture notes for a course I gave at ETH, during the Winter term 2000-2001, to undergraduate Mathematics and Physics students. Contents: Chapter 1 - Examples of Dynamical Systems Chapter 2 -…
Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Bosonic propagators and random paths 3. Random surfaces and strings 4. Matrix models and two-dimensional quantum gravity 5. The mystery of $c > 1$ 6. Euclidean quantum gravity in $d > 2$ 7. Discussion
An overview is given on those theoretical gravitational lensing results that can be formulated in a spacetime setting, without assuming that the gravitational fields are weak and that the bending angles are small. The first part is devoted…
These notes offer a lightening introduction to topological quantum field theory in its functorial axiomatisation, assuming no or little prior exposure. We lay some emphasis on the connection between the path integral motivation and the…