Related papers: Recent Progress in Formal Theory
We introduce the gauge/gravity, or AdS/CFT, correspondence with an eye towards its application to strongly coupled systems. We provide an overview of the duality, including the AdS/CFT dictionary and holographic renormalization. We then…
When recent observational evidence and the GR+FRW+CDM model are combined we obtain the result that the Universe is accelerating, where the acceleration is due to some not-yet-understood "dark sector". There has been a considerable number of…
The properties of a string-inspired two-dimensional theory of gravity are studied. The post-Newtonian and weak-field approximations, `stellar' structure and cosmological solutions of this theory are developed. Some qualitative similarities…
This article reviews recent developments in the study of universes with a positive cosmological constant in string theory.
An assessment is offered of the progress that the major approaches to quantum gravity have made towards the goal of constructing a complete and satisfactory theory. The emphasis is on loop quantum gravity and string theory, although other…
This is a set of lectures given at the 99' Cargese Summer School: Particle Physics : Ideas and Recent Developments. They contain a pedestrian exposition of recent theoretical progress in non-perturbative field theory and string theory based…
I describe our understanding of physics near the planck length, in particular the great progress of the last four years in string theory. Superstring theory, and a recent extension called M theory, are leading candidates for a quantum…
The present acceleration of the Universe strongly indicated by recent observational data can be modeled in the scope of a scalar-tensor theory of gravity. We show that it is possible to determine the structure of this theory (the scalar…
We discuss classical gravitational aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence, with the aim of obtaining a rigorous (mathematical) understanding of the semi-classical limit of the gravitational partition function. The paper surveys recent…
These lectures intend to give a pedagogical introduction into some of the developments in string theory during the last years. They include perturbative T-duality and non perturbative S- and U-dualities, their unavoidable demand for…
This report presents some studies of the gauge/string theory correspondence, a deep relation that is possible to establish between quantum field theories with local gauge symmetry and superstring theories including gravity. In its original…
Research during the last one decade or so suggests that the gravitational field equations in a large class of theories (including, but not limited to, general relativity) have the same status as the equations of, say, gas dynamics or…
Two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) has several sources: the search for simple examples of quantum field theory, the description of surface critical phenomena, the study of (super)string vacua. In the present overview of the…
Ideas about a duality between gauge fields and strings have been around for many decades. During the last ten years, these ideas have taken a much more concrete mathematical form. String descriptions of the strongly coupled dynamics of…
A discursive, non-technical, analysis is made of some of the basic issues that arise in almost any approach to quantum gravity, and of how these issues stand in relation to recent developments in the field. Specific topics include the…
Effective field theories offer a powerful method to unify diverse models under a small set of control parameters, allowing systematic expansions around well-established theories. These techniques, developed in particle physics, were…
General Relativity and the $\Lambda$CDM framework are currently the standard lore and constitute the concordance paradigm. Nevertheless, long-standing open theoretical issues, as well as possible new observational ones arising from the…
This article provides some historical background and then reviews developments in string theory over the last twenty-five years or so. Both perturbative and non-perturbative approaches to string theory are surveyed and their impact on how…
String Quantum Gravity is motivated and introduced. Advances in the study of the classical and quantum string dynamics in curved spacetime are reported: 1-New Classes of Exact Multistring solutions in curved spacetimes. 2-Mass spectrum of…
We discuss string theory relations between gravity and gauge theory tree amplitudes. Together with $D$-dimensional unitarity, these relations can be used to perturbatively quantize gravity theories, i.e. they contain the necessary…