The twenty-fifth anniversary edition featuring a new Preface, invaluable for graduate students and researchers in high energy physics and astrophysics.

Twenty-five years ago, Michael Green, John Schwarz, and Edward Witten wrote two volumes on string theory. Published during a period of rapid progress in this subject, these volumes were highly influential for a generation of students and researchers. Despite the immense progress that has been made in the field since then, the systematic exposition of the foundations of superstring theory presented in these volumes is just as relevant today as when first published. A self-contained introduction to superstrings, Volume 1 begins with an elementary treatment of the bosonic string, before describing the incorporation of additional degrees of freedom: fermionic degrees of freedom leading to supersymmetry and internal quantum numbers leading to gauge interactions. A detailed discussion of the evaluation of tree-approximation scattering amplitudes is also given. Featuring a new preface setting the work in context in light of recent advances, this book is invaluable for graduate students and researchers in general relativity and elementary particle theory.

Vol. 1.

A two-volume systematic exposition of superstring theory and its applications which presents many of the new mathematical tools that theoretical physicists are likely to need in coming years. This volume contains an introduction to superstrings

String theory is one of the most exciting and challenging areas of modern theoretical physics. This book guides the reader from the basics of string theory to recent developments. It introduces the basics of perturbative string theory, world-sheet supersymmetry, space-time supersymmetry, conformal field theory and the heterotic string, before describing modern developments, including D-branes, string dualities and M-theory. It then covers string geometry and flux compactifications, applications to cosmology and particle physics, black holes in string theory and M-theory, and the microscopic origin of black-hole entropy. It concludes with Matrix theory, the AdS/CFT duality and its generalizations. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in modern string theory, and will make an excellent textbook for a one-year course on string theory. It contains over 120 exercises with solutions, and over 200 homework problems with solutions available on a password protected website for lecturers at www.cambridge.org/9780521860697.

Detailed, step-by-step introduction to the theoretical foundations of strings and branes, essential reading for graduate students and researchers.