Related papers: Introduction to String Theory
This is a pedagogical introduction to D-branes, addressed to graduate students in field theory and particle physics and to other beginners in string theory. I am not going to review the most recent results since there are already many good…
These are a set of lectures presented at the CERN-La Plata-Santiago de Compostella School of Physics, La Plata, May 1997. A brief introduction to the non-perturbative structure of string theory is presented. Various non-perturbative…
We give the general solution for the elementary and solitonic D-brane configurations as a result of a reinterpretation of the already known p-branes. These solutions are found by means of a relevant conformal transformation on the string…
It is an old speculation that SU(N) gauge theory can alternatively be formulated as a string theory. Recently this subject has been revived, in the wake of the discovery of D-branes. In particular, it has been argued that at least some…
Nonperturbative effects in string theory are usually associated to D-branes. In many cases it can be explicitly shown that D-brane instantons control the large-order behavior of string perturbation theory, leading to the well-known (2g)!…
In these notes we provide a pedagogical introduction to the subject of tachyon condensation in Witten's cubic bosonic open string field theory. We use both the low-energy Yang-Mills description and the language of string field theory to…
A flux p-brane in D dimensions has (p+1)-dimensional Poincare invariance and a nonzero rank (D-p-1) field strength tangent to the transverse dimensions. We find a family of such solutions in string theory and M-theory and investigate their…
In this thesis we study string theory with D-branes and possibly orientifolds in curved or time-dependent spaces. Our study aims at understanding some aspects of curved and time-dependent spaces, notably because of their importance in…
These notes are based on lectures given by Michael Green during Part III of the Mathematics Tripos (the Certificate for Advanced Study in Mathematics) in the Spring of 2003. The course provided an introduction to string theory, focussing on…
An overview of string theory in the maximally supersymmetric plane-wave background is given, and some supersymmetric D-branes are discussed.
This is the written version of a set of introductory lectures on string theory.
We summarize recent progress in the understanding of minimal string theory, focusing on the worldsheet description of physical operators and D-branes. We review how a geometric interpretation of minimal string theory emerges naturally from…
In these lecture notes, an introduction to superstring theory is presented. Classical strings, covariant and light-cone quantization, supersymmetric strings, anomaly cancelation, compactification, T-duality, supersymmetry breaking, and…
K-theory provides a framework for classifying Ramond-Ramond (RR) charges and fields. K-theory of manifolds has a natural extension to K-theory of noncommutative algebras, such as the algebra considered in noncommutative Yang-Mills theory or…
We provide a pedagogical overview of inflation in string theory. Our theme is the sensitivity of inflation to Planck-scale physics, which we argue provides both the primary motivation and the central theoretical challenge for the subject.…
We argue that the behavior of string theory at high temperature and high longitudinal boosts, combined with the emergence of p-branes as necessary ingredients in various string dualities, point to a possible reformulation of strings, as…
This presentation is intended to give a flavour of the physics to be studied and discovered by exploiting the interface between string theory, M-theory and field theory provided by the dynamics of extended objects called `branes', and their…
These lectures provide an introduction to the subject of tachyon condensation in the open bosonic string. The problem of tachyon condensation is first described in the context of the low-energy Yang-Mills description of a system of multiple…
This article, based on the Klein lecture, contains some new results and new speculations on various topics. They include discussion of open strings in the AdS space, unusual features of D-branes, conformal gauge theories in higher…
Recent work on solutions to the Born-Infeld theory used to describe D-branes suggests that fundamental strings can be viewed, in a certain limit, as D-branes whose worldvolumes have collapsed to string-like configurations. Here we address…