Related papers: M-history without the M
These notes provide a hopefully pedagogic introduction to Born-Infeld theory and some of its uses in String/M-Theory from the perspective of some-one interested in spacetime geometry. Causality and the consequences of having both the open…
In this talk I review recent developments in superstring theory. In the first half of the talk I discuss some of the earlier developments in this subject. This includes a review of the status of string theory as a unified theory of gravity…
I discuss cosmological models either derived from, or inspired by, string theory or M-theory. In particular I discuss solutions in the low-energy effective theory and the role of the dilaton, moduli and antisymmetric form fields in the…
In this note we show that the Chern-Simons and the one-loop terms in the M-theory action can be written in terms of new characters involving the M-theory four-form and the string classes. This sheds a new light on the topological structure…
In these notes, based on a talk given at the Rencontres de Moriond, I give a simple introduction to the tremendous progress that has been made during the last few years towards the understanding of strong-coupling phenomena in quantum gauge…
Via compactification on a circle, the matrix model of M-theory proposed by Banks et al suggests a concrete identification between the large N limit of two-dimensional N=8 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and type IIA string theory. In this…
String theory has been the dominating research field in theoretical physics during the last decades. Despite the considerable time elapse, no new testable predictions have been derived by string theorists and it is understandable that…
In these lectures a general introduction to T-duality is given. In the abelian case the approaches of Buscher, and Ro\u{c}ek and Verlinde are reviewed. Buscher's prescription for the dilaton transformation is recovered from a careful…
I review the status of the issue of the k-string tension in Yang-Mills theory. After a summary of known facts I discuss a weakly coupled four-dimensional Yang-Mills theory that supports non-Abelian strings and can, in certain aspects, serve…
The first part of this report gives a very quick sketch of how string theory concepts originated and evolved during its first 25 years (1968-93). The second part presents a somewhat more detailed discussion of the highlights of the past…
String theory builds on the great legacy of Yukawa and Tomonaga: New degrees of freedom and control of the UV are two important themes. This talk will give an overview of some of the progress and some of the unsolved problems that…
This is a rendering of a review talk on the state of String Theory, given at the EPS-2003 Conference, intended for a wide audience of experimental and theoretical physicists. It emphasizes general ideas rather than technical aspects.
In a recent paper, Polchinski and Strassler found a string theory dual of a gauge theory with reduced supersymmetry. Motivated by their approach, we perturb the $\N=8$ theory living on a set of N M2 branes to $\N=2$, by adding fermion mass…
This article contains a short review of the current status of string theory.
We suggest that the (2,0) six dimensional field theory compactified on $S^1\times K3$ is the Matrix model description of both M-theory on $K3$ and the Heterotic string on $T^3$. This proposal is different from existing proposals for the…
One of the simplest time-dependent solutions of M theory consists of nine-dimensional Euclidean space times 1+1-dimensional compactified Milne space-time. With a further modding out by Z_2, the space-time represents two orbifold planes…
In this note it is demonstrated how the Seiberg-Witten solutions and related integrable systems may arise from certain brane configurations in M-theory. Some subtleties of the formulation of the Seiberg-Witten theory via integrable systems…
The key open problem of string theory remains its non-perturbative completion to M-theory. A decisive hint to its inner workings comes from numerous appearances of higher structures in the limits of M-theory that are already understood,…
In the past three years our views on how the standard model of particle physics could be embedded into string theory have dramatically changed. The heterotic string is no longer the only possibility for such an embedding and other…
We examine how to construct explicit heterotic string models dual to F-theory in eight dimensions. In doing so we learn about where the moduli spaces of the two theories overlap, and how non-perturbative features leave traces on a purely…