D膜
2010-1
世界图书出版公司
约翰逊
548
无
In view of the exciting developments in our understanding of those partic-ular aspects of fundamental physics that string theory seems to capture,it seems appropriate to collect together some of the key tools and ideaswhich helped move things forward. The developments included a truerevolution, since the physical perspective changed so radically that it un-dermined the long-standing status of strings as the basic fundamentalobjects, and instead the idea has arisen that a string theory descriptionis simply a special (albeit rather novel and beautiful) corner of a largertheory called 'M-theory'. This book is not an attempt at a history of therevolution, as we are (arguably) still in the midst of it, especially since weare in the awkward position of not knowing even one satisfactory intrin-sic definition of M-theory, and have implicit knowledge of it only throughinterconnections of its various limits. All revolutions are supposed to have a collection of characters whoplayed a crucial role in it, 'heroes' if you will. Hence, one would be ex-pected to proceed to list here the names of various individuals. WhileI was lucky to be in a position to observe a lot of the activity at first handand collect many wonderful anecdotes about how some things came to be,I will decline to start listing names at this juncture. It is too easy to yieldto the temptation to emphasise a few personalities in a short space (suchas this preface), and the result can sometimes be at the expense of others,a practice which happens all too often elsewhere. This seems to me to beespecially inappropriate in a field where the most striking characteristicof the contributions has been the collective effort of hundreds of thinkersall over the planet, often linked by e-mail and the web, often never havingmet each other in person.
爱因斯坦的后半生一直致力于将引力理论，纳入量子理论体系，但没有成功。上世纪80年代，由于在弦理论研究方面取得的巨大成果，使研究者看到新的希望。这被称为“第一次超弦革命”。1995年，弦理论研究迎来了第二次革命。其具有划时代意义的发现是D-膜（brane）和M-理论。它为人类提供了探索强耦合超弦理论的强有力工具。后继的研究表明，它也是人类理解诸如黑洞热力学微观机制、大N规范理论与引力理论之间全息对偶等深刻而未解难题的必由之路。 本书详细介绍膜理论的方方面面。尤其对初学者，它是J.Polchinski同类专著（String Theory, 已由世图引进）极好的补充。 本书是剑桥大学出版社出版的“数学物理”丛书之一。剑桥大学出版社出版的“数学物理”丛书，在国际上有崇高的声望。此类图书的引进，对国内的研究者，以及研究生都有极大的帮助。
作者：（英国）约翰逊（Clifford.V.Johnson）
List of inserts Preface 1 Overview and overture 1.1 The classical dynamics of geometry 1.2 Gravitons and photons 1.3 Beyond classical gravity: perturbative strings 1.4 Beyond perturbative strings: branes 1.5 The quantum dynamics of geometry 1.6 Things to do in the meantime 1.7 On with the show 2 Relativistic strings 2.1 Motion of classical point particles 2.2 Classical bosonic strings 2.3 Quantised bosonic strings 2.4 The sphere, the plane and the vertex operator 2.5 Chan-Paton factors 2.6 Unoriented strings 2.7 Strings in curved backgrounds 2.8 A quick look at geometry 3 A closer look at the world-sheet 3.1 Conformal invariance 3.2 Revisiting the relativistic string 3.3 Fixing the conformal gauge 3.4 The closed string partition function 4 Strings on circles and T-duality 4.1 Fields and strings on a circle 4.2 T-duality for closed strings 4.3 A special radius: enhanced gauge symmetry 4.4 The circle partition function 4.5 Toriodal compactifications 4.6 More on enhanced gauge symmetry 4.7 Another special radius: bosonisation 4.8 String theory on an orbifold 4.9 T-duality for open strings: D-branes 4.10 D-brane collective coordinates 4.11 T-duality for unoriented strings: orientifolds 5 Background fields and world-volume actions 5.1 T-duality in background fields 5.2 A first look at the D-brane world-volume action 5.3 The Dirac-Born-Infeld action 5.4 The action of T-duality 5.5 Non-Abelian extensions 5.6 D-branes and gauge theory 5.7 BPS lumps on the world-volume 6 D-brane tension and boundary states 6.1 The D-brane tension 6.2 The orientifold tension 6.3 The boundary state formalism 7 Supersymmetric strings 7.1 The three basic superstring theories 7.2 The two basic heterotic string theories 7.3 The ten dimensional supergravities 7.4 Heterotic toroidal compactifications 7.5 Superstring toroidal compactification 7.6 A superstring orbifold: discovering the K3 manifold 8 Supersymmetric strings and T-duality 8.1 T-duality of supersymmetric strings 8.2 D-branes as BPS solitons 8.3 The D-brane charge and tension 8.4 The orientifold charge and tension 8.5 Type I from type IIB, revisited 8.6 Dirac charge quantisation 8.7 D-branes in type I 9 World-volume curvature couplings 9.1 Tilted D-branes and branes within branes 9.2 Anomalous gauge couplings 9.3 Characteristic classes and invariant polynomials 9.4 Anomalous curvature couplings 9.5 A relation to anomalies 9.6 D-branes and K-theory 9.7 Further non-Abelian extensions 9.8 Further curvature couplings 10 The geometry of D-branes 10.1 A look at black holes in four dimensions 10.2 The geometry of D-branes 10.3 Probing p-brane geometry with Dp-branes 10.4 T-duality and supergravity solutions 11 Multiple D-branes and bound states 11.1 Dp and Dp from boundary conditions 11.2 The BPS bound for the Dp-Dp' system 11.3 Bound states of fundamental strings and D-strings 11.4 The three-string junction 11.5 Aspects of D-brane bound states 12 Strong coupling and string duality 12.1 Type IIB/type IIB duality 12.2 SO(32) Type I/heterotic' duality 12.3 Dual branes from 10D string-string duality 12.4 Type IIA/M-theory duality 12.5 Es x Es heterotic string/M-theory duality 12.6 M2-branes and M5-branes 12.7 U-duality 13 D-branes and geometry I 13.1 D-branes as probes of ALE spaces 13.2 Fractional D-branes and wrapped D-branes 13.3 Wrapped, fractional and stretched branes 13.4 D-branes as instantons 13.5 D-branes as monopoles 13.6 The D-brane dielectric effect 14 K3 orientifolds and compactification 14.1 ZN orientifolds and Chan-Paton factors 14.2 Loops and tadpoles for ALE ZM singularities 14.3 Solving the tadpole equations 14.4 Closed string spectra 14.5 Open string spectra 14.6 Anomalies for N=1 in six dimensions 15 D-branes and geometry II 15.1 Probing p with D(p-4) 15.2 Probing six-branes: Kaluza-Klein monopoles and M-theory 15.3 The moduli space of 3D supersymmetric gauge theory 15.4 Wrapped branes and the enhangon mechanism 15.5 The consistency of excision in supergravity 15.6 The moduli space of pure glue in 3D 16 Towards M- and F-theory 16.1 The type IIB string and F-theory 16.2 M-theory origins of F-theory 16.3 Matrix theory 17 D-branes and black holes 17.1 Black hole thermodynamics 17.2 The Euclidean action calculus 17.3 D=5 Reissner-NordstrSm black holes 17.4 Near horizon geometry 17.5 Replacing T4 with K3 18 D-branes, gravity and gauge theory 18.1 The AdS/CFT correspondence 18.2 The correspondence at finite temperature 18.3 The correspondence with a chemical potential 18.4 The holographic principle 19 The holographic renormalisation group 19.1 Renormalisation group flows from gravity 19.2 Flowing on the Coulomb branch 19.3 An N=1 gauge dual RG flow 19.4 An N=2 gauge dual RG flow and the enhangon 19.5 Beyond gravity duals 20 Taking stock References Index
插图：A closer look at the world..sheetThe careful reader has patiently suspended disbelief for a while now，al-lowing US to race through a somewhat rough presentation of some of thehighlights of the construction of consistent relativistic strings.This en。abled US，by essentially stringing lots of oscillators together，to go quitefar in developing our intuition for how things work，and for key aspectsof the language.Without promising to suddenly become rigourous，it seems a good ideato revisit some of the things we went over quickly,in order to unpacksome more details of the operation of the theory.This will allow US todevelop more tools and language for later use，and to see a bit furtherinto the structure of the theory.3.1 Conformal invarianceWe saw in section 2.2.8 that the use ofthe symmetries ofthe action to fix a gauge left over an infinite dimensional group of transformations which we could still perform and remain in that gauge.These are conformal trans-formations，and the world-sheet theory is in fact conformally invariant.It is worth digressing a little and discussing conformal invariance in arbi-trary dimensions first，before specialising to the case of two dimensions.We will find a surprising reason to come back to conformal invariance in higher dimensions much later，so there is a point to this.
《D膜》是由世界图书出版公司出版的。
无
比较差，有些地方有问题。