Required textbook

The required text will be useful for us, both as a backgrounder and as an anchor for a good fraction of the lecture material of the course.

It is:-

• A First Course in String Theory, by Barton Zwiebach.

This textbook is already on sale in the UofT bookstore.

I will supplement this textbook material (developed for advanced fourth-year MIT undergraduate students) with more advanced material from various other sources.

More advanced textbooks

The gold-standard texts for practitioners in the field of string theory are String Theory (two volumes) by Polchinski and Superstring Theory (two volumes, older) by Green, Schwarz and Witten. I also like D-Branes by Clifford Johnson. Serious string theory students should buy at least the first four of these. All of these texts are published by Cambridge University Press, and will be on reserve in the UofT Library.

(Please note that I will not be lending out any personal copies of any of these five advanced textbooks, or Zwiebach, at any time.)

Other advanced notes on various topics in string theory

• For lecture notes on black holes and black branes in string theory, including a lot about entropy, see my TASI-99 notes (PDF, 0.582MB) .
• Superspace, or 1001 Lessons in Supersymmetry (PDF, 3.03MB) - a newly-online book by Jim Gates, Marc Grisaru, Martin Rocek and Warren Siegel. Contains "all you ever wanted to know about SUSY but were afraid to ask".
• Antoine van Proeyen has a nice review on supergravity, including an introduction to spinors in diverse dimensions: Structure of Supergravity Theories (PDF, 0.304MB)
• Paul Ginsparg wrote a very comprehensive set of notes on CFT (conformal field theory) and its applications, for his Les Houches Lectures 1988 (PDF, 0.942MB)
• Michael Peskin has a set of elementary lectures on CFT and string perturbation theory in his TASI-86 lectures (PDF, 10.3MB)

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Regularly updated by course professor or her e-representative.