Related papers: String Theory: A Theory of Unification
Lenny Susskind has made many important contributions to theoretical physics during the past 35 years. In this talk I will discuss the early history of string theory (1968-72) emphasizing Susskind's contributions.
This article is a concise review of covariant string field theory prepared for the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics, Elsevier (2006). Referencing follows the publisher's guidelines.
With our current level of understanding, the problem of making string theory predictions is not one of "solving" the theory, but rather of trying to determine whether there are any generic expectations. Within this context, we discuss what…
These notes provide a brief introduction to modern cosmology, focusing primarily on theoretical issues. Some attention is paid to aspects of potential interest to students of string theory, on both sides of the two-way street of…
The physical motivations and the basic construction rules for Type I strings and M-theory compactifications are reviewed in light of the recent developments. The first part contains the basic theoretical ingredients needed for building…
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…
I review some of the recent progress in two-dimensional string theory, which is formulated as a sum over surfaces embedded in one dimension.
It has been shown that there is a sequential embedding structure in a $w_N$\ string theory based on a linearized $W_N$\ algebra. The $w_N$\ string theory is obtained as a special realization of the $w_{N+1}$\ string. The $w_{\infty}$\…
In an effort to promote communication between the formal and phenomenological branches of the high-energy theory community, we provide a description of some important issues in supersymmetric and string phenomenology. We describe each…
Using as a springboard a three-way debate between theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright and myself, I address in layman's terms the issues of why we need a unified theory of the fundamental interactions…
These notes are devoted to the intriguing and still largely unexplored links between String Theory and Higher Spins, the types of excitations that lie behind its most cherished properties. A closer look at higher-spin fields provides some…
Much of the recent progress in String Theory can be traced to a precise strategy: a careful study of the few models known since the beginnings of the subject, and the abstraction from them of basic properties that one would like to demand…
This Ph.D. thesis collects results obtained investigating two different aspects of modern unifying theories. In the first part I summarized results achieved investigating simplicial aspects of string dualities. Exploiting Boundary Conformal…
I discuss several aspects of strings as unified theories. After recalling the difficulties of the simplest supersymmetric grand unification schemes I emphasize the distinct features of string unification. An important role in constraining…
We consider string theory in a time dependent orbifold with a null singularity. The singularity separates a contracting universe from an expanding universe, thus constituting a big crunch followed by a big bang. We quantize the theory both…
In these lectures we review the basic ideas of perturbative and non-perturbative string theory. On the non-perturbative side we give an introduction to D-branes and string duality. The elementary concepts of non-BPS branes and…
Some problems in finding a complete quantum theory incorporating gravity are discussed. One is that of giving a consistent unitary description of high-energy scattering. Another is that of giving a consistent quantum description of…
The first lecture gives a colloquium-level overview of string theory and M-theory. The second lecture surveys various attempts to construct a viable model of particle physics. A recently proposed approach, based on F-theory, is emphasized.
In this review I discuss some basic aspects of non-perturbative string theory. The topics include test of duality symmetries based on the analysis of the low energy effective action and the spectrum of BPS states, relationship between…
These lecture notes present an elementary introduction to light-cone string field theory, with an emphasis on its application to the study of string interactions in the plane wave limit of AdS/CFT. We summarize recent results and conclude…