Related papers: M Theory from World-Sheet Defects in Liouville Str…
The fields of the conjectured ``heterotic" super--fivebrane sigma--model in ten dimensions are made out of a well known gravitational sector, the $X$ and the $\vartheta$, and of a still unknown heterotic sector which should be coupled to…
These lectures intend to give a pedagogical introduction into some of the developments in string theory during the last years. They include perturbative T-duality and non perturbative S- and U-dualities, their unavoidable demand for…
It is argued that the type IIA 10-dimensional superstring theory is actually a compactified 11-dimensional supermembrane theory in which the fundamental supermembrane is identified with the the solitonic membrane of 11-dimensional…
Three-dimensional conformal theories with six supersymmetries and SU(4) R-symmetry describing stacks of M2-branes are here proposed to be related to generalized Jordan triple systems. Writing the four-index structure constants in an…
We compute the superconformal index of 3d $\mathcal{N}=2$ superconformal theories obtained from $N$ M5-branes wrapped on a hyperbolic 3-manifold. Exploiting the 3d-3d correspondence, we use perturbative invariants of $SL(N,\mathbb{C})$…
We study toroidal compactifications of Type II string theory with D-branes and nontrivial antisymmetric tensor moduli and show that turning on these fields modifies the supersymmetry projections imposed by D-branes. These modifications are…
We review some aspects of the D1/D5 system of type IIB string theory and the associated five dimensional black hole. We include a pedagogical discussion of the construction of relevant classical solutions in supergravity. We discuss the…
Recently it was observed that the hyperbolic compactification of M/string theory related to S-branes may lead to a transient period of acceleration of the universe. We study time evolution of the corresponding effective 4d cosmological…
$\alpha'$ corrections to near-horizon dynamics of a Schwarzschild black hole in a large number of spacetime dimensions $D$ are governed by the worldsheet theory composed of the cigar CFT and the classical sigma model on the sphere at the…
We investigate aspects of the four-dimensional effective description of brane world scenarios based on warped compactification on anti-de Sitter space. The low-energy dynamics is described by visible matter gravitationally coupled to a…
We find the membrane equations which describe the leading order in $1/D$ dynamics of black holes in the $D\rightarrow\infty$ limit for the most general four-derivative theory of gravity in the presence of a cosmological constant. We work up…
We find and analyse solutions of Einstein's equations in arbitrary d dimensions and in the presence of a scalar field with a Liouville potential coupled to a Maxwell field. We consider spacetimes of cylindrical symmetry or again subspaces…
These lecture notes review current progress on the class of conformal theories which may be studied by quantizing the conformal Toda dynamics. After summarizing recent developments in undertanding the quantum group structure of the…
The study of discrete gauge symmetries in field theory and string theory is often carried out by embedding them into continuous symmetries. Many symmetries however do not seem to admit such embedding, for instance discrete isometries given…
We study configurations consisting of a pair of non-extremal black holes in four dimensions, both with the same mass, and with charges of the same magnitude but opposite sign---diholes, for short. We present such exact solutions for…
We derive the world-volume theory, the (non)-extremal entropy and background geometry of black holes and black strings constructed out of the NS IIA fivebrane within the framework of matrix theory. The CFT description of strings propagating…
We review some results concerning the properties of static, spherically symmetric solutions of multidimensional theories of gravity: various scalar-tensor theories and a generalized string-motivated model with multiple scalar fields and…
A new class of warped Anti-de Sitter solutions is found, arising as the near-horizon region of various semi-localized brane intersections. The dual gauge theories of AdS in warped spacetimes have reduced supersymmetry, which is pertinent to…
M-theory can be defined on closed manifolds as well as on manifolds with boundary. As an extension, we show that manifolds with corners appear naturally in M-theory. We illustrate this with four situations: The lift to bounding twelve…
We study the 't Hooft anomalies of four-dimensional superconformal field theories that arise from M5-branes wrapped on a punctured Riemann surface. In general there are two independent contributions to the anomalies. There is a bulk term…