String Theory - 2º Semester 2019/2020

Lecturer:	Gabriel Lopes Cardoso

	Email: gabriel.lopes.cardoso@tecnico.ulisboa.pt

	Office: Departamento de Matemática, 5th floor, room 5.42

Classes:	Tuesday 16h30-18h30 (room P9, DM) & Thursday 16h30-18h30 (room P9, DM)	As of March 16, due to Covid-19 containment measures in place, lectures will be held online using video conferencing, and lecture notes will be scanned and made available to the students.

Program

Bosonic string: Polyakov action, open and closed string; quantization.

Introduction to conformal field theory.

String interactions: tree-level and one-loop amplitudes.

Compactification and T-duality: toroidal compactication, closed strings and T-duality.

Fermionic string. RNS string. GSO projection.

Modular invariance.

Low energy effective actions.

Buscher duality.

Bibliography

A Primer on String Theory, Volker Schomerus, 2017, Cambridge University Press.

Basic Concepts of String Theory, Ralph Blumenhagen, Dieter Lüst, Stefan Theisen, 2013, Springer.

Quantum Fields and Strings: A Course for Mathematicians, Vol. 2, 1999, American Mathematical Society, IAS.

String Theory, Joseph Polchinski, 1998, Cambridge University Press. What is String Theory?

Superstring Theory, M.B. Green, J.H. Schwarz and E. Witten, 1987, Cambridge University Press.

Paul Ginsparg: Applied Conformal Field Theory.

Evaluation

Homework assignments (60%) + Project (40%)

Project

Project (due July 5).

Weekly assignments

Homework assignment 1 (due March 10).

Homework assignment 2 (due March 24).

Homework assignment 3 (due April 14).

Homework assignment 4 (due April 30).

Homework assignment 5 (due May 14).

Homework assignment 6 (due May 28).

Summary