Introduction to String Theory

Graduate students typically enter into courses on string theory having little to no familiarity with the mathematical background so crucial to the discipline. As such, this book, based on lecture notes, edited and expanded, from the graduate course taught by the author at SISSA and BIMSA, places particular emphasis on said mathematical background. The target audience for the book includes students of both theoretical physics and mathematics. This explains the book’s "strange" style: on the one hand, it is highly didactic and explicit, with a host of examples for the physicists, but, in addition, there are also almost 100 separate technical boxes, appendices, and starred sections, in which matters discussed in the main text are put into a broader mathematical perspective, while deeper and more rigorous points of view (particularly those from the modern era) are presented. The boxes also serve to further shore up the reader’s understanding of the underlying math. In writing this book,the author’s goal was not to achieve any sort of definitive conciseness, opting instead for clarity and "completeness". To this end, several arguments are presented more than once from different viewpoints and in varying contexts. 

Chapter 1. The Polyakov path integral.- Chapter 2. Introduction to 2d conformal field theories.- Chapter 3. Spectrum, vertices, and BRST quantization.- Chapter 4. Tree and one-loop amplitudes in the bosonic string.- Chapter 5. Consistent 10d superstring, modular invariance, and all that.- Chapter 6. The Heterotic string: part I.- Chapter 7. Toroidal compactifications and T-duality (bosonic string).- Chapter 8. The Heterotic string: part II.- Chapter 9. Superstring interactions and anomalies.- Chapter 10. Superstring D-branes.- Chapter 11. Strings at strong coupling.- Chapter 12. Calabi-Yau compactifications. Appendix.

Sergio Cecotti graduated with a degree in physics from the University of Pisa in 1979, and has worked at Harvard University, UCLA, the CERN in Geneva and the ICTP in Trieste. He has taught physics at the University of Pisa, the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste (SISSA), and now at BIMSA in Beijing.