个人简介

Joseph Polchinski received his Ph.D.from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Harvard, he Joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984, moving to his present position of Professor of Physics at the University of Califrona at Santa barbara, and Permanent Member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, in 1992.

内容简介

When I first decided to write a book on string theory, more than ten years ago, my memories of my student years were much more vivid than they are today. Still, I remember that one of the greatest pleasures was finding a text that made a difficult subject accessible, and I hoped to provide the same for string theory.
Thus, my first purpose was to give a coherent introduction to string theory, based on the Polyakov path integral and conformal field theory. No previous knowledge of string theory is assumed. I do assume that the reader is familiar with the central ideas of general relativity, such as metrics and curvature, and with the ideas of quantum field theory through non- Abelian gauge symmetry. Originally a full course of quantum field theory was assumed as a prerequisite, but it became clear that many students were eager to learn string theory as soon as possible, and that others had taken courses on quantum field theory that did not emphasize the tools needed for string theory. I have therefore tried to give a self-contained introduction to those tools.
A second purpose was to show how some of the simplest four- dimensional string theories connect with previous ideas for unifying the Standard Model, and to collect general results on the physics of four- dimensional string theories as derived from world-sheet and spacetime symmetries. New developments have led to a third goal, which is to intro- duce the recent discoveries concerning string duality, M-theory, D-branes, and black hole entropy.