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We investigate whether the symmetry transformations of a bosonic string are connected by T-duality. We start with a standard closed string theory. We continue with a modified open string theory, modified to preserve the symmetry…
String theory, if it describes nature, is probably strongly coupled. In light of recent developments in string duality, this means that the ``real world'' should correspond to a region of the classical moduli space which admits no weak…
String theory has been initially derived from motivations coming from strong interaction phenomenology,but its application faced deep conceptual and practical difficulties. The strong interactions found their theoretical foundation…
These are the lecture notes of the introductory String Theory course held by one of the authors for the master program of Theoretical Physics at Turin University. The world-sheet approach to String Theory is pedagogically introduced in the…
String breaking is a central dynamical process in theories featuring confinement, where a string connecting two charges decays at the expense of the creation of new particle-antiparticle pairs. Here, we show that this process can also be…
The relationship between mathematics and physics has long been an area of interest and speculation. Subscribing to the recent definition by Tegmark, we present a mathematical structure involving the only division rings - the real,…
These lectures are devoted to introducing some of the basic features of quantum geometry that have been emerging from compactified string theory over the last couple of years. The developments discussed include new geometric features of…
We investigate the most general phase space of configurations, consisting of all possible ways of assigning elementary attributes, ``energies'', to elementary positions, ``cells''. We discuss how this space possesses structures that can be…
We explore two different problems in string theory in which duality relates an ordinary p-form in one theory to a self-dual (p+1)-form in another theory. One problem involves comparing D4-branes to M5-branes, and the other involves…
String field theory is a candidate for a full non-perturbative definition of string theory. We aim to define string field theory on a space-time lattice to investigate its behaviour at the quantum level. Specifically, we look at string…
String theory can (in principle) describe gravity at all curvature scales, and can be applied to cosmology to look back in time beyond the Planck epoch. The duality symmetries of string theory suggest a cosmological picture in which the…
The aim of these lectures is to give an introduction to several topics which lie at the intersection of string theory, gravity theory and gravity phenomenology. One successively reviews: (i) the "membrane" approach to the dissipative…
This is a completely reformulated presentation of a previous paper with the same title; this time with a much stronger emphasis on conceptual aspects of string theory and a detailed review of its already more than four decades lasting…
This article surveys some of the highlights in the development of string theory through the first superstring revolution in 1984. The emphasis is on topics in which the author was involved, especially the observation that critical string…
It is shown that the string concept results naturally from considerations of gravitation. This paper describes a derivation of linearized general relativity based upon the hypotheses of special covariance and the existence of a…
This lecture surveys a few loosely related topics, ranging from the scarcity of quantum field theories -- and the role that this has played, and still plays, in physics -- to paradoxes involving black holes in soluble two dimensional string…
I discuss various aspects of background independence in the context of string theory, for which so far we have no manifestly background independent formulation. After reviewing the role of background independence in classical Einstein…
The fundamental string length, which is an essential part of string theory, explicitly breaks scale invariance. However, in field theory we demonstrated recently that the gravitational constant, which is directly related to the string…
We review the existence, formation and properties of cosmic strings in string theory, the wide variety of observational techniques that are being employed to detect them, and the constraints that current observations impose on string theory…
This thesis presents several new insights on the interface between mathematics and theoretical physics, with a central role for fermions on Riemann surfaces. First of all, the duality between Vafa-Witten theory and WZW models is embedded…