The areas covered in this volume include: duality in string theory and supersymmetric gauge theories; phenomenological applications of string theory; strings in curved spacetime; quantum gravity; SUSY conformal field theories; QCD strings; aspects of mathematical physics, including: mirror symmetry, W-algebras, representation theory.

Physics World's 'Book of the Year' for 2016 An Entertaining and Enlightening Guide to the Who, What, and Why of String Theory, now also available in an updated reflowable electronic format compatible with mobile devices and e-readers. During the last 50 years, numerous physicists have tried to unravel the secrets of string theory. Yet why do these scientists work on a theory lacking experimental confirmation? Why String Theory? provides the answer, offering a highly readable and accessible panorama of the who, what, and why of this large aspect of modern theoretical physics. The author, a theoretical physics professor at the University of Oxford and a leading string theorist, explains what string theory is and where it originated. He describes how string theory fits into physics and why so many physicists and mathematicians find it appealing when working on topics from M-theory to monsters and from cosmology to superconductors.

At what point does theory depart the realm of testable hypothesis and come to resemble something like aesthetic speculation, or even theology? The legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a phrase for such ideas: He would describe them as "not even wrong," meaning that they were so incomplete that they could not even be used to make predictions to compare with observations to see whether they were wrong or not. In Peter Woit's view, superstring theory is just such an idea. In Not Even Wrong , he shows that what many physicists call superstring "theory" is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish. Not Even Wrong explains why the mathematical conditions for progress in physics are entirely absent from superstring theory today and shows that judgments about scientific statements, which should be based on the logical consistency of argument and experimental evidence, are instead based on the eminence of those claiming to know the truth. In the face of many books from enthusiasts for string theory, this book presents the other side of the story.

The remarkable recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider completed the Standard Model of particle physics and has paved the way for understanding the physics which may lie beyond it. String/M theory has emerged as a broad framework for describing a plethora of diverse physical systems, which includes condensed matter systems, gravitational systems as well as elementary particle physics interactions. If string/M theory is to be considered as a candidate theory of Nature, it must contain an effectively four-dimensional universe among its solutions that is indistinguishable from our own. In these solutions, the extra dimensions of string/M theory are “compactified” on tiny scales which are often comparable to the Planck length. String phenomenology is the branch of string/M theory that studies such solutions, relates their properties to data, and aims to answer many of the outstanding questions of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.This book contains perspectives on string phenomenology from some of the leading experts in the field. Contributions will range from pedagogical general overviews and perspectives to more technical reviews. We hope that the reader will get a sense of the significant progress that has been made in the field in recent years (e.g. in the topic of moduli stabilization) as well as the topics currently being researched, outstanding problems and some perspectives for the future.