Strings Conformal Fields And M Theory

Building on the foundations laid in his Introduction to Superstrings and M Theory, Professor Kaku discusses such topics as the classification of conformal string theories, knot theory, the Yang-Baxter relation, quantum groups, and the insights into 11-dimensional strings recently obtained from M-theory. New chapters discuss such topics as Seiberg-Witten theory, M theory and duality, and D-branes. Throughout, the author conveys the vitality of the current research and places readers at its forefront. Several chapters reviewing the fundamentals of string theory, making the presentation of the material self-contained while keeping overlap with the earlier book to a minimum.

Building on the foundations laid in his Introduction to Superstrings and M Theory, Professor Kaku discusses such topics as the classification of conformal string theories, knot theory, the Yang-Baxter relation, quantum groups, and the insights into 11-dimensional strings recently obtained from M-theory. New chapters discuss such topics as Seiberg-Witten theory, M theory and duality, and D-branes. Throughout, the author conveys the vitality of the current research and places readers at its forefront. Several chapters reviewing the fundamentals of string theory, making the presentation of the material self-contained while keeping overlap with the earlier book to a minimum.

Called by some "the theory of everything," superstrings may solve a problem which has eluded physicists for the past 50 years -- the final unification of the two great theories of the twentieth century, general relativity and quantum field theory. This is a course-tested comprehensive introductory graduate text on superstrings which stresses the most current areas of interest, not covered in other presentation, including: string field theory, multi loops, Teichmueller spaces, conformal field theory, and four-dimensional strings. The book begins with a simple discussion of point particle theory, and uses the Feynman path integral technique to unify the presentation of superstrings. Prerequisites are an aquaintance with quantum mechanics and relativity. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout.

This book guides the reader through string theory, one of the most exciting and challenging areas of modern theoretical physics. It is ideal for graduate students and researchers in modern string theory, and will make an excellent textbook. It contains exercises with solutions, and homework problems with solutions.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough. Niels Bohr Superstring theory has emerged as the most promising candidate for a quan tum theory of all known interactions. Superstrings apparently solve a problem that has defied solution for the past 50 years, namely the unification of the two great fundamental physical theories of the century, quantum field theory and general relativity. Superstring theory introduces an entirely new physical picture into theoretical physics and a new mathematics that has startled even the mathematicians. Ironically, although superstring theory is supposed to provide a unified field theory of the universe, the theory itself often seems like a confused jumble offolklore, random rules of thumb, and intuition. This is because the develop ment of superstring theory has been unlike that of any other theory, such as general relativity, which began with a geometry and an action and later evolved into a quantum theory. Superstring theory, by contrast, has been evolving backward for the past 20 years. It has a bizarre history, beginning with the purely accidental discovery of the quantum theory in 1968 by G. Veneziano and M. Suzuki. Thumbing through old math books, they stumbled by chance on the Beta function, written down in the last century by mathematician Leonhard Euler.

String theory is one of the most exciting and challenging areas of modern theoretical physics. This book guides the reader from the basics of string theory to recent developments. It introduces the basics of perturbative string theory, world-sheet supersymmetry, space-time supersymmetry, conformal field theory and the heterotic string, before describing modern developments, including D-branes, string dualities and M-theory. It then covers string geometry and flux compactifications, applications to cosmology and particle physics, black holes in string theory and M-theory, and the microscopic origin of black-hole entropy. It concludes with Matrix theory, the AdS/CFT duality and its generalizations. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in modern string theory, and will make an excellent textbook for a one-year course on string theory. It contains over 120 exercises with solutions, and over 200 homework problems with solutions available on a password protected website for lecturers at www.cambridge.org/9780521860697.

The purpose of this book is to thoroughly prepare the reader for research in string theory at an intermediate level. As such it is not a compendium of results but intended as textbook in the sense that most of the material is organized in a pedagogical and self-contained fashion. Beyond the basics, a number of more advanced topics are introduced, such as conformal field theory, superstrings and string dualities - the text does not cover applications to black hole physics and cosmology, nor strings theory at finite temperatures. End-of-chapter references have been added to guide the reader wishing to pursue further studies or to start research in well-defined topics covered by this book.