Reader’s Guide to String Duality and Matrix Theory

Abstract

The canonical reference here is the book of Green, Schwarz, and Witten, Superstrings Vol I and II, published by Cambridge University Press. However, a new two volume work by J. Polchinski, also published by Cambridge, is more up to date, and has much more material relevant to M theory and String Duality. The important things to understand from these references are the connection of two dimensional (super) conformal field theories with the Feynman diagrams representing the expansion of string theory around some classical background. This leads to a connection between string states and background fields that shows that many string perturbation expansions are expansions of the same theory around different backgrounds. All of these expansions contain what appear to be consistent perturbative treatments of quantum supergravity (SUGRA). From this point of view, there appear to be 5 + 1 really DIFFERENT string theories called, IIA,B, IA,B and HetA,B.