UCSD String Theory Seminar, Winter 2006
UCSD String Theory seminar, Winter 2006
Tuesdays 10:30-12:00 in room 7218.
Organisers: Justin Roberts, Nitu Kitchloo
As usual for our Tuesdays seminar, this is a ``learning seminar'' and
most participants will be expected to give talks. In the first meeting
at 11am on Tuesday Jan 10, we will give a brief introduction and then survey
the contents of the various lectures, so that participants can pick
their favorite topic.
The goal is to read the following book:
"A first course in String Theory", by Barton Zwiebach.
In the hands of Witten and other mathematical physicists, string
theories (and more generally, the techniques of quantum field theory)
have had a gigantic impact on geometry and topology over the last
twenty years. Though the genuine physical significance of these
subjects is still debatable (many of the mathematically-interesting
models are what physicists would call "toy models") and physicists'
methods often lack adequate mathematical foundations, they have a
strong internal consistency and lead to numerous surprising
mathematical conjectures which could scarcely have been contemplated
without this insight.
We want in our seminar to try to understand the way physicists
work. This is actually quite a hard task, because their goals,
intuition and language are really different from ours, and require
continual translation. (I would sum up the distinction by saying that
mathematicians deal mostly in nouns, physicists in verbs.) Zwiebach's
book, for an MIT undergraduate physics course, seems to me unusually
readable. Its level of mathematical sophistication is not very high,
so we will probably be able to worry mostly about the actual
physics. Perhaps later on we can try to read some of the rather more
advanced book
"String theory", by Joseph Polchinski.
We will start by reviewing some essential basic physics.
Provisional outline of lecture topics:
Jan 10 (11am): Introductory meeting
Jan 17: Justin Roberts Mechanics, relativity, electromagnetism
Jan 24: Henning Hohnhold Quantum mechanics
Jan 31 : Sean Raleigh The classical string
Feb 7: Dave Clark Conservation laws and strings
Feb 14: Jeff Rabin Quantum field theory
Feb 21: Michael Hansen The quantum open string
Feb 28: Ben Cooper The quantum closed string
March 7: Mark Gross T-duality
March 14: TBA Covariant quantization
March 21: TBA TBA?
justin@math.ucsd.edu
