Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Physics - Relativity

In a distilled and pedagogical fashion, the contributions to this volume of the famous summer school in Les Houches cover the recent developments in supersymmetric string theory, the gauge theory/string theory correspondence and string duality. Further chapters deal with quantum gravity and D-brane geometry. Black hole mechanics and cosmology are treated too, as well as the AdS-CFT correspondence. The book is a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments in string/M-theory and quantum gravity. It addresses graduate students in physics and astrophysics.

In a distilled and pedagogical fashion, the contributions to this volume of the famous summer school in Les Houches cover the recent developments in supersymmetric string theory, the gauge theory/string theory correspondence and string duality. Further chapters deal with quantum gravity and D-brane geometry. Black hole mechanics and cosmology are treated too, as well as the AdS-CFT correspondence. The book is a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments in string/M-theory and quantum gravity. It addresses graduate students in physics and astrophysics.

Recently, analogies between laboratory physics (e.g. quantum optics and condensed matter) and gravitational/cosmological phenomena such as black holes have attracted an increasing interest. This book contains a series of selected lectures devoted to this new and rapidly developing field. Various analogies connecting (apparently) different areas in physics are presented in order to bridge the gap between them and to provide an alternative point of view.

Some 25 years after the birth of inflationary cosmology this volume sets out to provide a both authoritative and pedagogical introduction and review of the state of the field. Cosmic inflation corresponds to an episode of accelerated expansion of the very early universe and solves nicely a collection of puzzles that had plagued standard cosmology so far. Different scenarios exist, though, and the reader will learn about the "ins" and "outs" as the subject and related issues are surveyed. With lectures written by eminent scientists in the field, many of them having made pioneering...

All physicists would agree that one of the most fundamental problems of the 21st century physics is the dimensionality of the world. In the four-dimensional world of Minkowski (or Minkowski spacetime) the most challenging problem is the nature of the temporal dimension. In Minkowski spacetime it is merely one of the four dimensions, which means that it is entirely given like the other three spacial dimensions. If the temporal dimension were not given in its entirety and only one constantly changing moment of it existed, Minkowski spacetime would be reduced to the ordinary three-dimensional...

This book provides an original introduction to the geometry of Minkowski space-time. A hundred years after the space-time formulation of special relativity by Hermann Minkowski, it is shown that the kinematical consequences of special relativity are merely a manifestation of space-time geometry.

The book is written with the intention of providing students (and teachers) of the first years of University courses with a tool which is easy to be applied and allows the solution of any problem of relativistic kinematics at the same time. The book treats in a rigorous way, but using a...

The majority of books dealing with prospects for interstellar flight tackle the problem of the propulsion systems that will be needed to send a craft on an interstellar trajectory. The proposed book looks at two other, equally important aspects of such space missions, and each forms half of this two part book.

Part 1 looks at the ways in which it is possible to exploit the focusing effect of the Sun as a gravitational lens for scientific missions to distances of 550 AU and beyond into interstellar space. The author explains the mechanism of the Sun as a gravitational lens, the...

In this thesis the author discusses the phenomenology of supersymmetric models by means of experimental data set analysis of the electric dipole moment. There is an evaluation of the elementary processes contributing to the electric dipole moments within R-parity-violating supersymmetry, which call for higher-order perturbative computations.

A new method based on linear programming is developed and for the first time the non-trivial parameter space of R-parity violation respecting the constraints from existing experimental data of the electric dipole moment is revealed. As well, the...

Based on class-tested notes, this text offers an introduction to Conformal Field Theory with a special emphasis on computational techniques of relevance for String Theory. It introduces Conformal Field Theory at a basic level, Kac-Moody algebras, one-loop partition functions, Superconformal Field Theories, Gepner Models and Boundary Conformal Field Theory.

Eventually, the concept of orientifold constructions is explained in detail for the example of the bosonic string.

In providing many detailed CFT calculations, this book is ideal for students and scientists intending to...