These volumes, a collection of a series of articles with commentary notes by the editor, describe supersymmetric theories for particle interactions from the earliest developments to the latest advancements. The book, divided into two volumes, will mainly focus its attention on subjects related to the application of N = 1 supersymmetry and supergravity to unified theories, encompassing all fundamental forces of nature. Particular emphasis is given to the ultraviolet cancellations in supersymmetric field theories, naturalness and hierarchy of scales, spontaneous symmetry breaking, super-Higgs effect and its applications to high energy physics. Both perturbative and non-perturbative aspects of supersymmetric field theories are covered. Over a hundred seminar papers are reprinted in these volumes.

The publication of the first edition of "Introduction to Supersymmetry and Supergravity" was a remarkable success. This second edition contains a substantial amount of new material especially on two-dimensional supersymmetry algebras, their irreducible representations as well as rigid and local (i.e. supergravity) theories of 2-dimensional supersymmetry both in x-space and superspace. These theories include the actions for the superstring and the heterotic string. In addition, a chapter is devoted to a discussion on superconformal algebras in two dimensions and contains an account of super operator product expansion.

Understanding the dynamics of gauge theories is crucial, given the fact that all known interactions are based on the principle of local gauge symmetry. Beyond the perturbative regime, however, this is a notoriously difficult problem. Requiring invariance under supersymmetry turns out to be a suitable tool for analyzing supersymmetric gauge theories over a larger region of the space of parameters. Supersymmetric quantum field theories in four dimensions with extended N=2 supersymmetry are further constrained and have therefore been a fertile field of research in theoretical physics for quite some time. Moreover, there are far-reaching mathematical ramifications that have led to a successful dialogue with differential and algebraic geometry. These lecture notes aim to introduce students of modern theoretical physics to the fascinating developments in the understanding of N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories in a coherent fashion. Starting with a gentle introduction to electric-magnetic duality, the author guides readers through the key milestones in the field, which include the work of Seiberg and Witten, Nekrasov, Gaiotto and many others. As an advanced graduate level text, it assumes that readers have a working knowledge of supersymmetry including the formalism of superfields, as well as of quantum field theory techniques such as regularization, renormalization and anomalies. After his graduation from the University of Tokyo, Yuji Tachikawa worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. Presently at the Department of Physics, University of Tokyo, Tachikawa is the author of several important papers in supersymmetric quantum field theories and string theory.

This is the first volume in a series of books on the general theme of Supersymmetric Mechanics; the series is based on lectures and discussions held in 2005 and 2006 at the INFN-Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati. This volume supplies a pedagogical introduction, at the non-expert level, to the attractor mechanism in space-time singularities. After a qualitative overview, explicit examples realizing the attractor mechanism are treated at length.

This is the third volume in a series of books on general topics in supersymmetric mechanics. This collection presents material from the well established international and annual INFN-Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati Winter School on the Attractor Mechanism.

The discovery by Green and Schwarz in 1984 that ten-dimensional superstring theory is anomaly-free and finite only if the Yang-Mills gauge group is SO(32) or E8 x E8 has made the phenomenological possibilities of superstrings evident. Ths has resulted in a sudden surge of interest in superstrings unification. Since this fast-developing field is new to almost all theoretical physicist, this collection of basic pre-1985 references should be very valuable. This two volumes contain over 1000 pages of reprints plus some introductory comments by J Schwarz.