String Theory - 2º Semester 2016/2017

Lecturer: Gabriel Lopes Cardoso
Email: gcardoso@math.tecnico.ulisboa.pt
Office: Departamento de Matemática, 5th floor, room 5.42
Classes: Tuesday 13h-15h (room P9, DM) & Thursday 13h-15h (room P9, DM)


Program

Bosonic strings: Polyakov action, open and closed string; quantization.

Introduction to conformal field theory.

String interactions: tree-level and one-loop amplitudes.

Low energy effective actions.

Compactification and T-duality: toroidal compactication, closed strings and T-duality.

Fermionic strings.



Bibliography

Basic Concepts of String Theory, Ralph Blumenhagen, Dieter Lüst, Stefan Theisen, 2013, Springer.

String Theory, Joseph Polchinski, 1998, Cambridge University Press. What is String Theory?

Quantum Fields and Strings: A Course for Mathematicians, Vol. 2, 1999, American Mathematical Society, IAS.

Superstring Theory, M.B. Green, J.H. Schwarz and E. Witten, 1987, Cambridge University Press.

A First Course in String Theory, Barton Zwiebach, 2004, Cambridge University Press.

David Tong: Lectures on String Theory.

Robbert Dijkgraaf: Les Houches Lectures on Fields, Strings and Duality.

Paul Ginsparg: Applied Conformal Field Theory.



Evaluation

Homework assignments (60%) + Project (40%)



Weekly assignments

Week 1: reading assignment The Mathematics of M-theory, by Robbert Dijkgraaf.

Homework assignment 1 (due March 9).

Homework assignment 2 (due March 16).

Homework assignment 3 (due April 18).

Reading assignment: The Ghost CFT, section 5.

Homework assignment 4 (due May 4).

Homework assigment 5 (due May 18).

Homework assignment 6 (due June 1).