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This book presents a string-theoretic approach to new ideas in particle physics, also known as Physics Beyond the Standard Model, and to cosmology. The concept of Naturalness and its apparent violation by the low electroweak scale and the small cosmological constant is emphasized. It is shown that string theory, through its multitude of solutions, known as the landscape, offers a partial resolution to these naturalness problems as well as suggesting more speculative possibilities like that of a multiverse.
The book is based on a one-semester course, as such, it has a pedagogical approach, is self-contained and includes many exercises with solutions. Notably, the basics of string theory are introduced as part of the lectures.
These notes are aimed at graduate students with a solid background in quantum field theory, as well as at young researchers from theoretical particle physics to mathematical physics. This text also benefits students who are in the process of studying string theory at a deeper level. In this case, the volume serves as additional reading beyond a formal string theory course.
List of contents
Reminder of SM, EFTs and a naive view of the hierarchy and cosmological constant problems.- Basics of SUSY and SUGRA.- A crash course on strings and how to derive the 10d supergravity action for Type IIB.- Kaluza-Klein compactifications.- Calabi-Yau compactifications.- Flux-landscape in a toy-model.- Flux-landscape in Calabi-Yaus.- Moduli-stabilization and uplift.- Landscape-statistics.- Eternal inflation.- The Measure Problem.
About the author
Arthur Hebecker, after studying physics in Moscow, Frankfurt/Main and Munich, gained his PhD from the University of Hamburg/DESY in 1995. His Diploma and PhD supervisors were Julius Wess (Munich) and Wilfried Buchmüller (Hamburg). Arthur Hebecker spent his postdoc years in Stanford, Cambridge, Heidelberg and at CERN. He won a Feodor-Lynnen Fellowship from the Humboldt-Foundation and a Heisenberg-Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. After a brief period as a staff member at DESY/Hamburg, he became a professor of theoretical particle physics and cosmology at the University of Heidelberg in 2004, where he is working on physics beyond the Standard Model, string phenomenology and cosmological inflation. He has been a member of the Particle Data Group since 2015, where he was a co-author of the review on Grand Unified Theories.
