PHY2406H Special Topic: String Theory

Recommended textbooks

By far the best introduction to string theory is: A First Course in String Theory, by Barton Zwiebach. I recommend that you buy this if you are at all curious about string theory. This book is designed for undergraduates with a solid physics grounding in both third-year quantum mechanics and electromagnetism, and hence should be accessible to anyone in our graduate programme.

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. Serious string theory students should buy all four of these.

All of these texts are published by Cambridge University Press, and will be on reserve in the UofT Library.

Other advanced notes on string theory & related topics

• 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) .
• Michael Peskin has a set of elementary lectures on Conformal Field Theory (CFT) and string perturbation theory in his TASI-86 lectures (PDF, 10.3MB)
• Paul Ginsparg wrote a very comprehensive set of notes on CFT and its applications, for his Les Houches Lectures 1988 (PDF, 0.942MB)
• 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)

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awpeet (2006)