Recent Developments in String Theory

A brief review of the status of duality symmetries in string theory is presented. The evidence is accumulating rapidly that an enormous group of duality symmetries, including perturbative T dualities and non-perturbative S-dualities, underlies string theory. It is my hope that an understanding of these symmetries will suggest the right way to formulate non-perturbative string theory. Whether or not this hope is realized, it has already been demonstrated that this line of inqu...

The strong coupling limit of a quantum system is in general quite complicated, but in some cases a great simplification occurs: the strongly coupled limit is equivalent to the weakly coupled limit of some other system. In string theory conjectures of this type go back several years, but only in the past year and a half has it been understood to be a general principle applying to all string theories. This has improved our understanding of string dynamics, including quantum gra...

This is a rendering of a review talk on the state of String Theory, given at the EPS-2003 Conference, intended for a wide audience of experimental and theoretical physicists. It emphasizes general ideas rather than technical aspects.

The talk contains a brief introduction string theory, followed by a discussion of some of the recent developments.

String theory and supersymmetry are theoretical ideas that go beyond the standard model of particle physics and show promise for unifying all forces. After a brief introduction to supersymmetry, we discuss the prospects for its experimental discovery in the near future. We then show how the magic of supersymmetry allows us to solve certain quantum field theories exactly, thus leading to new insights about field theory dynamics related to electric-magnetic duality. The discuss...

The first part of this report gives a very quick sketch of how string theory concepts originated and evolved during its first 25 years (1968-93). The second part presents a somewhat more detailed discussion of the highlights of the past decade. The final part discusses some of the major problems that remain to be solved.

In this set of lectures I review recent developments in string theory emphasizing their non-perturbative aspects and their recently discovered duality symmetries. The goal of the lectures is to make the recent exciting developments in string theory accessible to those with no previous background in string theory who wish to join the research effort in this area. Topics covered include a brief review of string theory, its compactifications, solitons and D-branes, black hole en...

String theory builds on the great legacy of Yukawa and Tomonaga: New degrees of freedom and control of the UV are two important themes. This talk will give an overview of some of the progress and some of the unsolved problems that characterize string theory today. It is divided into two parts: (1) Connecting String Theory to the Real World; (2) Gauge Theory/String Theory Duality. Two other major subjects, which I will omit, are Black Holes in String Theory and The Impact of S...

String theory appears to admit a group of discrete field transformations -- called $S$ dualities -- as exact non-perturbative quantum symmetries. Mathematically, they are rather analogous to the better-known $T$ duality symmetries, which hold perturbatively. In this talk the evidence for $S$ duality is reviewed and some speculations are presented.

Duality, the equivalence between seemingly distinct quantum systems, is a curious property that has been known for at least three quarters of a century. In the past two decades it has played a central role in mapping out the structure of theoretical physics. I discuss the unexpected connections that have been revealed among quantum field theories and string theories.