Reading Assignments for
Physics 234B String Theory II

Spring 2020

This is the list of the reading assignment choices. They will be assigned to the students officially registered for the course, on the first-come first-serve basis. Please review the list, choose one paper, wait until Monday, March 30 2pm PDT, and after that cutoff time, send me an email specifying your choice to horava@berkeley.edu. (All requests that will arrive before the cutoff will be ignored :) I will then confirm by a return email whether the paper has been assigned to you, and will update the list with the name of the student attached to each paper.

Once you read the paper assigned to you, you will prepare a two-page typed summary of your understanding of its main points. You will email me this summary at the time to be determined later, sometime towards the end of April. Update: The summaries are due by Thursday, April 30, midnight PDT -- please email them directly to me, in the form of a pdf file. I will then distribute these summaries in a few emails addressed to our 234B class mailing list, and you can review and enjoy other people's summaries, and ask follow-up questions about their assigned paper. Hopefully this will stimulate some interesting discussions, by email, Zoom, etc.

In addition, it is my sincere hope that the reading materials posted here will provide some additional solace during these trying times, by focusing our minds on the truth and beauty hidden in the mathematics and physics of string theory and quantum gravity. So, here are the assignments, enjoy!

Update (4/1/20): The possibility to sign up for your selected Reading Assignment paper by email has been opened since Monday, March 30. Most students have since made their selection, and have been informed of their assigned paper. Those papers that have already been assigned to a student indicate that status in the list below, with the name of the student listed in brackets [] after each selected reference. This is supposed to encourage further informal discussions: If you are interested in the topic of a paper, I encourage you to contact the student who has selected that paper, and ask questions (via email, Zoom, etc).
The pdf files with summaries are now due on Thursday, April 30, by midnight. Please email them directly to me.

[1] E. Witten, Strong Coupling and the Cosmological Constant, arXiv:hep-th/9506101. [Max Dornfest]
[2] J. Polchinski, M-Theory and the Light Cone, arXiv:hep-th/9903165.
[3] R. Dijkgraaf, C. Vafa and E. Verlinde, M-Theory and a Topological String Duality, arXiv:hep-th/0602087. [Jinhuan He]
[4] N. Arkani-Hamed, L. Motl, A. Nicolis and C. Vafa, The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as the Weakest Force, arXiv:hep-th/0601001.
[5] L. Mezincescu and P.K. Townsend, Anyons from Strings, arXiv:1008.2334.
[6] H. Casini, M. Huerta and R.C. Myers, Towards a Derivation of Holographic Entanglement Entropy, arXiv:1102.0440. [Shijun Sun]
[7] S. Janiszewski and A. Karch, Nonrelativistic Holography from Hořava Gravity, arXiv:1211.0005.
[8] E. Witten, More on Superstring Perturbation Theory: An Overview of Superstring Perturbation Theory via Super Riemann Surfaces, arXiv:1304.2832.
[9] S.H. Shenker and D. Stanford, Black Holes and the Butterfly Effect, arXiv:1306.0622. [Rahul Sahay]
[10] E. Witten, The Feynman i epsilon in String Theory, arXiv:1307.5124. [Jihwan Oh]
[11] A. Strominger and A. Zhiboedov, Gravitational Memory, BMS Supertranslations and Soft Theorems, arXiv:1411.5745. [Mengyang Zhang]
[12] J. Maldacena, S.H. Shenker and D. Stanford, A Bound on Chaos, arXiv:1503.01409. [Reginald Caginalp]
[13] F. Pastawski, B. Yoshida, D. Harlow and J. Preskill, Holographic Quantum-Correcting Codes: Toy Models for the Bulk/Boundary Correspondence, arXiv:1503.06237. [Newton Cheng]
[14] E. Silverstein, Inflation in String Theory Confronts Data, arXiv:1512.02089.
[15] S.W. Hawking, M.J. Perry and A. Strominger, Soft Hair on Black Holes, arXiv:1601.00921.
[16] L. Hui, J.P. Ostriker, S. Tremaine and E. Witten, Ultralight Scalars as Cosmological Dark Matter, arXiv:1610.08297.
[17] W. Fu, D. Gaiotto, J. Maldacena and S. Sachdev, Supersymmetric SYK Models, arXiv:1610.08917.
[18] E. Witten, An SYK-Like Model without Disorder, arXiv:1610.09758.
[19] J. Maldacena, D. Stanford and Z. Yang, Diving into Traversable Wormholes, arXiv:1704.05333. [Liz Wildenhain]
[20] E. Silverstein, The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory, arXiv:1706.02790. [Andres Franco Valiente]
[21] R. Dijkgraaf and E. Witten, Developments in Topological Gravity, arXiv:1804.03275.
[22] G. Obied, H. Ooguri, L. Spodyneiko and C. Vafa, De Sitter Space and the Swampland, arXiv:1806.08362.
[23] J.C. Donoghue et al, From QCD Strings to WZW, arXiv:1812.07043.
[24] J. Cotler, K. Jensen and A. Maloney, Low-Dimensional de Sitter Quantum Gravity, arXiv:1905.03780. [Jiabao Yang]
[25] G. Penington, Entanglement Wedge Reconstruction and the Information Paradox, arXiv:1905.08255. [Chitraang Murdia]
[26] A. Sen, D-Instanton Perturbation Theory, arXiv:2002.04043.

horava@berkeley.edu