Related papers: Les Houches Lectures on Fields, Strings and Dualit…
This brief survey aims to set the stage and summarize some of the ideas under discussion at the Workshop on Singular Geometry and Higgs Bundles in String Theory, to be held at the American Institute of Mathematics from October 30th to…
These are the lecture notes for a short course in topological string theory that I gave at Uppsala University in the fall of 2004. The notes are aimed at PhD students who have studied quantum field theory and general relativity, and who…
This is a general introduction to duality in field theories. The existence and breaking of global symmetries is used as a guideline to systematically prove duality between different field theories. Systems discussed include abelian and…
These lectures review the formalism of renormalization in quantum field theories with special regard to effective quantum field theories. While renormalization theory is part of every advanced course on quantum field theory, for effective…
In this lecture we review some of the recent developments in string theory on an introductory and qualitative level. In particular we focus on S-T-U dualities of toroidally compactified ten-dimensional string theories and outline the…
These are the notes on two-dimensional conformal field theory, based on a lecture course for graduate math students, given by P.M. in fall 2022 at the University of Notre Dame. These notes are intended to be substantially reworked and…
Notes of the lectures delivered in Les Houches during the Summer School on Complex Systems (July 2006).
Lecture notes prepared for the Les Houches school "Quantum Geometry: Mathematical Methods for Gravity, Gauge Theories and Non-Perturbative Physics" that took place during the summer 2024. We cover the techniques to perform the exact…
These are the lecture notes of a set of lectures delivered at the 1995 Trieste summer school in June. I review some recent work on duality in four dimensional Maxwell theory on arbitrary four manifolds, as well as a new set of topological…
Talk given at the ``4th Hellenic School on Elementary Particle Physics", Corfu, 2-20 September 1992: The propagation of strings in cosmological space-time backgrounds is reviewed. We show the relation of a special class of cosmological…
This is an introduction to the properties of D-branes, topological defects in string theory on which string endpoints can live. D-branes provide a simple description of various nonperturbative objects required by string duality, and give…
These are the notes for a set of lectures delivered by the two authors at the Les Houches Summer School on `Complex Systems' in July 2006. They provide an introduction to the basic concepts in modern (probabilistic) coding theory,…
These are lecture notes expanding upon a set of lectures given by G.M. at the TASI 2023 School. Part I is an introduction to topological field theory, including extended topological field theory. Part II is an introduction to generalized…
The phenomenological aspects of string theory are briefly reviewed. Emphasis is given to the status of 4D string model building, effective Lagrangians, model independent results, supersymmetry breaking and duality symmetries.
This is a writeup of lectures given at the EPFL Lausanne in the fall of 2012. The topics covered: physical foundations of conformal symmetry, conformal kinematics, radial quantization and the OPE, and a very basic introduction to conformal…
This review is devoted to strings and branes. Firstly, perturbative string theory is introduced. The appearance of various types of branes is discussed. These include orbifold fixed planes, D-branes and orientifold planes. The connection to…
Lecture notes reviewing most recent developments in string/M/brane theory given by C. G. at the CIME Summer International Center of Mathematics at Cetraro. July 1997.
This is a one semester course on bosonic string theory aimed at beginning graduate students. The lectures assume a working knowledge of quantum field theory and general relativity. Contents: 1. The Classical String 2. The Quantum String 3.…
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…
These are the lecture notes from a course given in July 2005 at the summer school in Les Houches. We describe some recent results concerning two-dimensional conformally invariant systems. In particular, we discuss conformally invariant…