M Theory Fivebrane and SQCD

In these notes, based on a talk given at the Rencontres de Moriond, I give a simple introduction to the tremendous progress that has been made during the last few years towards the understanding of strong-coupling phenomena in quantum gauge theories and superstring theories.

We briefly review superstring theories, highlighting the important concepts, developments, and open problems of the subject.

Lectures given at the Isaac Newton Institute, NATO-ASI School on "Confinement, Duality and Non-Perturbative Aspects of QCD", 23 June - 4 July, 1997.

N=1 supersymmetric QCD is considered using the recently proposed picture of it as the world volume theory of a single M-theory fivebrane with two of its dimensions wrapped on a Riemann surface. The conditions under which a second M-theory brane can be introduced preserving some supersymmetry are analysed. Such configurations represent BPS saturated extended objects in the quantum field theory on the brane worldvolume. Formulae for the tension of these extended objects are der...

The talks presented in the string theory and supergravity session of the GR16 conference in Durban, South Africa are described below for the proceedings.

The present status of superstring phenomenology is briefly discussed.

These four lectures, addressed to an audience of graduate students in experimental high energy physics, survey some of the basic concepts in string theory. The purpose is to convey a general sense of what string theory is and what it has achieved. Since the characteristic scale of string theory is expected to be close to the Planck scale, the structure of strings probably cannot be probed directly in accelerator experiments. The most accessible experimental implication of sup...

These are lecture notes on string theory at Fudan University.

I comment on some theoretical work presented at QCD Moriond 2006.

The past year has seen enormous progress in string theory. It has become clear that all of the different string theories are different limits of a single theory. Moreover, in certain limits, one obtains a new, eleven-dimensional structure known as $M$-theory. Strings with unusual boundary conditions, known as D-branes, turn out to be soliton solutions of string theory. These have provided a powerful tool to probe the structure of these theories. Most dramatically, they have y...