Physics 250: String Theory and M-Theory
shortcut to the list of papers
 The Reading Assignment
The reading assingment is the most important factor for a successful
completion of this course. By April 15, each student will sign up for
one paper from the list below, by email. Each paper will be assigned to
only one student, on the "first-come, first-served" basis. Please do not
assume that the paper has been assigned to you until you get an email
confirmation from me. In order to facilitate communication, the name
of the assigned student will appear on the list below, as soon as the
paper has been assigned.
Once you have been assigned a paper, you will write a two-page summary,
in any form of tex or latex that you like. These summaries will be due
by noon, May 3. Then, in the final week of the semester, each student will
present the summary of the paper in a five-to-ten minutes "advertisement"
talk in front of the class. The purpose of such an advertisement is to
allow the rest of the class to talk to the presenter afterwards, ask
questions, and learn more about that particular paper if they find it
interesting. I also encourage students to talk to the assignee of a given
paper even before the end-of-semester presentations, if they are interested
in that particular material.
List of Papers for Reading Assignments
The papers have been selected such that the material covered in them is
clearly important, but somewhat complementary to the material presented in
lectures during the semester. The intent is to broaden our experience and
our exposure to various aspects of string theory.
Since there are almost twenty students in this class, I decided to select
exactly one paper per year in the past twenty-year history of string theory.
I am very excited about this selection, and I hope that reading these papers
(and then hearing about them in the final week of the semester) will be a lot
of fun for everyone involved.
Here is the list:
1987:
D.J. Gross and P.F. Mende, String Theory Beyond the Planck Scale,
Nucl. Phys. B303 (1988) 407 (online version available at
ScienceDirect)
[Stephen Glassman]
1988:
J.J. Atick and E. Witten, The Hagedorn Transition and the Number of
Degrees of Freedom of String Theory, Nucl. Phys. B310 (1988) 291
(online version available at
ScienceDirect)
[Roland De Putter]
1989:
E. Martinec,
Criticality, Catastrophes, and Compactifications, Paris/Chicago
preprint, April 1989
1990:
R. Dijkgraaf and E. Witten, Mean Field Theory, Topological Field Theory,
and Multimatrix Models, Nucl. Phys. B342 (1990) 486
(online version available at
ScienceDirect)
1991:
E. Witten, On String Theory and Black Holes, Phys. Rev. D44
(1991) 314
[Gabriel Wong]
1992:
E. Witten, Chern-Simons Gauge Theory as a String Theory,
hep-th/9207094
[Stefan Leichenauer]
1993:
B. Zwiebach, Closed String Field Theory: An Introduction,
hep-th/9305026
[Jackson Debuhr]
1994:
M.R. Douglas, Chern-Simons-Witten Theory as a Topological Fermi
Liquid, hep-th/9403119
[Patrick Coles]
1995:
M. Bershadsky, V. Sadov and C. Vafa, D-Branes and Topological Field
Theories, hep-th/9511222
[Ruza Markov]
1996:
P. Hořava and E. Witten, Eleven-Dimensional Supergravity on a
Manifold with Boundary, hep-th/9603142
[Peter Battaglino]
1997:
G.T. Horowitz and J. Polchinski, Self Gravitating Fundamental Strings,
hep-th/9707170
[Shannon McCurdy]
1998:
A.W. Peet and J. Polchinski, UV/IR Relations in AdS Dynamics,
hep-th/9809022
[Matt Buckley]
1999:
N. Seiberg and E. Witten, String Theory and Noncommutative Geometry,
hep-th/9908142
[Anthony Tagliaferro]
2000:
R. Gopakumar, S. Minwalla, N. Seiberg and A. Strominger, OM Theory in
Diverse Dimensions, hep-th/0006062
[Bom Soo Kim]
2001:
R. Emparan and H. Reall, A Rotating Black Ring in Five Dimensions,
hep-th/0110260
[Austin Hedeman]
2002:
J.P. Gauntlett, J.B. Gutowski, C.M. Hull, S. Pakis and H.S. Reall,
All Supersymmetric Solutions of Minimal Supergravity in Five
Dimensions, hep-th/0209114
2003:
E. Witten, Perturbative Gauge Theory as String Theory in Twistor
Space, hep-th/0312171
2004:
H. Lin, O. Lunin and J. Maldacena, Bubbling AdS Space and 1/2 BPS
Geometries, hep-th/0409174
[I-Sheng Yang]
2005:
M. Schnabl, Analytic Solution for Tachyon Condensation in Open String
Field Theory, hep-th/0511286
[Benjamin Lipshitz]
2006:
C. Beasley, D. Gaiotto, M. Guica, L. Huang, A. Strominger and X. Yin,
Why Z_{BH}=|Z_{top}|^2, hep-th/0608021
[Chris Beem]
horava@berkeley.edu
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