Reading Assignments for
Physics 234B String Theory II

Spring 2019

This is the list of the reading assignment choices, with the dates of their intended presentation in the discussion sessions. 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 Friday March 22 12 noon, and after that cutoff time, send me an email specifying your choice to horava@berkeley.edu). 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 presenter 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, and you will present the summary in a talk during the corresponding discussion session. Each talk will be 20 minutes plus 5 minutes of questions from the audience. The discussion sessions will be on Thursdays, 11:10am-12:30pm, and Fridays, 12:40-2pm -- all of them in our usual lecture room 402 Le Conte Hall. If anyone anticipates having time conflicts with the scheduled presentation times, please let me know by email asap.

Friday, April 5:

Since no students signed up to present References [1] and [2], this particular discussion session is cancelled -- the discussions will begin on April 11.
[1] L. Mezincescu and P.K. Townsend, Anyons from Strings, arXiv:1008.2334.
[2] J.C. Donoghue et al, From QCD Strings to WZW, arXiv:1812.07043.

Thursday, April 11:

[3] R. Dijkgraaf, C. Vafa and E. Verlinde, M-Theory and a Topological String Duality, arXiv:hep-th/0602087 (Katherine Hambleton).
[4] R. Dijkgraaf and E. Witten, Developments in Topological Gravity, arXiv:1804.03275 (Venkatesa Chandrasekaran).
[5] J. Polchinski, M-Theory and the Light Cone, arXiv:hep-th/9903165 (Winston Yin).

Friday, April 19:

[6] W. Fu, D. Gaiotto, J. Maldacena and S. Sachdev, Supersymmetric SYK Models, arXiv:1610.08917 (Mengyang Zhang).
[7] E. Witten, An SYK-Like Model without Disorder, arXiv:1610.09758 (Yanqi Wang).
[8] J. Murugan, D. Stanford and E. Witten, More on Supersymmetric and 2d Analogs of the SYK Model, arXiv:1706.05362 (Alexander Avdoshkin).

Thursday, April 25:

[9] S.W. Hawking, M.J. Perry and A. Strominger, Soft Hair on Black Holes, arXiv:1601.00921 (Stefan Ivanovic).
[10] F. Pastawski, B. Yoshida, D. Harlow and J. Preskill, Holographic Quantum-Correcting Codes: Toy Models for the Bulk/Boundary Correspondence, arXiv:1503.06237 (Marcus Bintz).
[11] J. Maldacena, D. Stanford and Z. Yang, Diving into Traversable Wormholes, arXiv:1704.05333 (Jiabao Yang).

Friday, May 3:

[12] S. Janiszewski and A. Karch, Nonrelativistic Holography from Hořava Gravity, arXiv:1211.0005 (Stephen Randall).
[13] F.M. Haehl, R. Loganayagam and M. Rangamani, Schwinger-Keldysh Formalism I: BRST Symmetries and Superspace, arXiv:1610.01940 (Alexander Frenkel).
[14] E. Silverstein, Inflation in String Theory Confronts Data, arXiv:1512.02089 (Mykhaylo Usatyuk).

horava@berkeley.edu