By Volker Schomerus
Cambridge University Press
This textbook aims to provide a concise introduction to string theory for undergraduate and graduate students.
String theory was first proposed in the 1960s and has become one of the main candidates for a possible quantum theory of gravity. While going through alternate phases of highs and lows, it has influenced numerous areas of physics and mathematics, and many theoretical developments have sprung from it.
It was the intention of the author to include in the book just the fundamental concepts and tools of string theory, rather than to be exhaustive. As Schomerus states, there are already various textbooks available that cover this field in detail, from its roots to its most modern developments, but these might be dispersive and overwhelming for students approaching the topic for the first time.
The volume is composed of a brief historical introduction and two parts, each including various chapters. The first part is dedicated to the dynamics of strings moving in a flat Minkowski space. While these string theories do not describe nature, their study is helpful to understand many basic concepts and constructions, and to explore the relation between string theory and field theory on a two-dimensional “world”.
The second part deals with string theories for four-dimensional physics, which can be relevant to the description of our universe. In particular, the motion of superstrings on backgrounds in which some of the dimensions are curled up is studied (this phenomenon is called compactification). This part, in turn, includes three sections devoted to as many subtopics.
First, the author discusses conformal field theory, also dealing with the SU(2) Wess–Zumino–Novikov–Witten model. Then, he passes on to treat Calabi–Yau spaces and the associated string compactification. Finally, he focuses on string dualities, giving special emphasis to the AdS/CFT correspondence and its application to gauge theory.
