D-Branes

Clifford V. Johnson obtained his BSc in physics at Imperial College, University of London, and his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Southampton. He won a 1992 Lindeman Fellowship and a 1992 SERC NATO Fellowship, and became a member of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He then spent a year teaching and undertaking research at the Physics Department of Princeton University, and went on to hold a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara. He was then Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky and Reader in Theoretical Physics at Durham University. He is currently a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Southern California.

• List of inserts; Preface; 1. Overview and overture; 2. Relativistic strings; 3. A closer look at the world-sheet; 4. Strings on circles and T-duality; 5. Background fields and world-volume actions; 6. D-branes tension and boundary states; 7. Supersymmetric strings; 8. Supersymmetric strings and T-duality; 9. World-volume curvature couplings; 10. The geometry of D-branes; 11. Multiple D-branes and bound states; 12. Strong coupling and string duality; 13. D-branes and geometry I; 14. K3 orientifolds and compactification; 15. D-branes and geometry II; 16. Towards M- and F-theory; 17. D-branes and black holes; 18. D-branes, gravity and gauge theory; 19. The holographic renormalisation group; 20. Taking stock; References; Index.