In a distilled and pedagogical fashion, the contributions to this volume of the famous summer school in Les Houches cover the recent developments in supersymmetric string theory, the gauge theory/string theory correspondence and string duality. Further chapters deal with quantum gravity and D-brane geometry. Black hole mechanics and cosmology are treated too, as well as the AdS-CFT correspondence. The book is a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments in string/M-theory and quantum gravity. It addresses graduate students in physics and astrophysics.

In a distilled and pedagogical fashion, the contributions to this volume of the famous summer school in Les Houches cover the recent developments in supersymmetric string theory, the gauge theory/string theory correspondence and string duality. Further chapters deal with quantum gravity and D-brane geometry. Black hole mechanics and cosmology are treated too, as well as the AdS-CFT correspondence. The book is a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments in string/M-theory and quantum gravity. It addresses graduate students in physics and astrophysics.

The book gathers the lecture notes of the Les Houches Summer School that was held in August 2011 for an audience of advanced graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in particle physics, theoretical physics, and cosmology, areas where new experimental results were on the verge of being discovered at CERN. Every Les Houches School has its own distinct character. This one was held during a summer of great anticipation that at any moment contact might be made with the most recent theories of the nature of the fundamental forces and the structure of space-time. In fact, during the session, the long anticipated discovery of the Higgs particle was announced. The book vividly describes the fruitful and healthy "schizophrenia" that is the rule among the community of theoreticians who have split into several components: those doing phenomenology, and those dealing with highly theoretical problems, with a few trying to bridge both domains. The lectures by theoreticians covered many directions in the theory of elementary particles, from classics such as the Supersymmetric Standard Model to very recent ideas such as the relation between black holes, hydrodynamics, and gauge-gravity duality. The lectures by experimentalists explained in detail how intensively and how precisely the LHC collider has verified the theoretical predictions of the Standard Model, predictions that were at the front lines of experimental discovery during the 70's, 80's and 90's, and how the LHC is ready to make new discoveries. They described many of the ingenious and pioneering techniques developed at CERN for the detection and the data analysis of billions of billions of proton-proton collisions.

Research in string theory has generated a rich interaction with algebraic geometry, with exciting new work that includes the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture. This monograph builds on lectures at the 2002 Clay School on Geometry and String Theory that sought to bridge the gap between the languages of string theory and algebraic geometry, presenting an updated discussion that includes subsequent developments. The group of distinguished mathematicians and mathematical physicists who produced this monograph worked as a team to create a unique volume. Its overall goal is to explore the physical and mathematical aspects of Dirichlet branes. The narrative is organized around two principal ideas: Kontsevich's Homological Mirror, Symmetry conjecture, and the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture. The authors explain how Kontsevich's conjecture is equivalent to the identification of two different categories of Dirichlet branes. They also explore the ramifications and current state of the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture. They relate the ideas to active areas of research that include the McKay correspondence, topological quantum field theory, and stability structures. The authors were not satisfied to tell their story twice, from separate mathematics and physics points of view. Instead, theirs is a unified presentation offered in a way that both mathematicians and physicists can follow, without having all of the foundations of both subjects at their immediate disposal.