Physics 234B: String Theory II
Reading Assignments
Spring 2008
After Spring break, the six remaining discussion sessions will be devoted
to student presentations of their reading assignments: Each student will
select a research paper from the list of twelve papers (see below). Each
discussion session will be evenly divided between two students
(20 minutes of paper presentation, plus 5 minutes discussion). Students
who signed up on the pass/fail basis are exempt from the Reading
Assignment. Please sign up for your paper by sending me an email
(horava@berkeley.edu) with your choice; the papers will be assigned on
the first-come, first-served basis. Names of students assigned to individual
papers will also appear on this list below. Please make your selections
as soon as possible; the absolute deadline for signing up is March 31.
 List of reading-assignment papers
Thursday, April 3:
(i)
O. Aharony, A brief review
of "little string theories," hep-th/9911147 (Jeremy Mardon).
(ii)
O. Aharony, M. Berkooz,
D. Kutasov and N. Seiberg, Linear dilatons, NS5-branes and holography,
hep-th/9808149 (Charles Melby-Thompson).
Thursday, April 10:
(i) either
N. Seiberg, L. Susskind and
N. Toumbas, Strings in background electric field, space/time
noncommutativity and a new noncritical string theory,
hep-th/0005040,
or
R. Gopakumar, J. Maldacena,
S. Minwalla and A. Strominger, S-duality and noncommutative gauge
theory, hep-th/0005048 (Anthony Tagliaferro).
(ii)
R. Gopakumar, S. Minwalla,
N. Seiberg and A. Strominger, OM theory in diverse dimensions,
hep-th/0006062 (An Huang - this paper will be presented on April 10
in the morning, at 10:35am).
Tuesday, April 15, 10:35am:
J. Khoury, B. Ovrut, P.
Steinhardt and N. Turok, The Ekpyrotic Universe: Colliding Branes and
the Origin of the Hot Big Bang, hep-th/0103239 (Jordan Carlson).
Thursday, April 17:
(i)
A. Okounkov, N. Reshetikhin and
C. Vafa, Quantum Calabi-Yau and classical crystals, hep-th/0309208
(Ruža Markov).
(ii)
E. Witten, Perturbative
gauge theory as a string theory in twistor space, hep-th/0312171
(Jon Aytac).
Thursday, April 24:
(i)
S. Bhattacharyya, V. Hubeny, S. Minwalla and M. Rangamani,
Nonlinear Fluid Dynamics from Gravity, arXiv:0712.2456 (Gabriel Wong).
(ii)
R. Emparan, D. Mateos and
P. Townsend, Supergravity supertubes, hep-th/0106012 (Ben Lipshitz).
Thursday, May 1:
(i)
J. McGreevy, L. Susskind and
N. Toumbas, Invasion of giant gravitons from anti-de Sitter space,
hep-th/0003075 (Shannon McCurdy).
(ii)
H. Lin, O. Lunin and J.
Maldacena, Bubbling AdS space and 1/2 BPS geometries,
hep-th/0409174 (Chris Beem).
Thursday, May 8:
(i) Sections 5 and 6 of
S.D. Mathur, The quantum
structure of black holes, hep-th/0510180 (Marat Freytsis).
(ii)
S. Kachru, R. Kallosh, A. Linde,
J. Maldacena, L. McAllister and S. Trivedi, Towards inflation in
string theory, hep-th/0308055 (Stefan Leichenauer).
horava@berkeley.edu
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