Les Houches Lectures on Constructing String Vacua

Les Houches Lectures on Strings and Arithmetic∗

These are lecturenotes for two lectures delivered at the Les Houches workshop on Number Theory, Physics, and Geometry, March 2003. They review two examples of interesting interactions between number theory and string compactification, and raise some new questions and issues in the context of those examples. The first example concerns the role of the Rademacher expansion of coefficients of modul...

Les Houches lectures on matrix models and topological strings

In these lecture notes for the Les Houches School on Applications of Random Matrices in Physics we give an introduction to the connections between matrix models and topological strings. We first review some basic results of matrix model technology and then we focus on type B topological strings. We present the main results of Dijkgraaf and Vafa describing the spacetime string dynamics on certai...

What Is String Theory ?

Lectures presented at the 1994 Les Houches Summer School " Fluctuating Geome-tries in Statistical Mechanics and Field Theory. " The first part is an introduction to conformal field theory and string perturbation theory. The second part deals with the search for a deeper answer to the question posed in the title.

ar X iv : h ep - t h / 97 03 13 6 v 1 1 9 M ar 1 99 7 March 1997 Les Houches Lectures on Fields , Strings and Duality ∗

Notes of my 14 ‘lectures on everything’ given at the 1995 Les Houches school. An introductory course in topological and conformal field theory, strings, gauge fields, supersymmetry and more. The presentation is more mathematical then usual and takes a modern point of view stressing moduli spaces, duality and the interconnectedness of the subject. An apocryphal lecture on BPS states and D-branes...

Les Houches Lectures on Black Holes