Table of Contents

Preface; Part I. Introduction to Gravity and Supergravity: 1. Differential geometry; 2. Noether's theorems; 3. A perturbative introduction to general relativity; 4. Action principles for gravity; 5. N = 1, 2, d = 4 supergravities; 6. Conserved charges in general relativity; Part II. Gravitating Point-Particles: 7. The Schwarzschild black hole; 8. The Reissner-Nordström black hole; 9. The Taub-NUT solution; 10. Gravitational pp-waves; 11. The Kaluza-Klein black hole; 12. Dilaton and dilaton/axion black holes; 13. Unbroken supersymmetry; Part III. Gravitating Extended Objects of String Theory: 14. String theory; 15. The string effective action and T duality; 16. From eleven to four dimensions; 17. The type-IIB superstring and type-II T duality; 18. Extended objects; 19. The extended objects of string theory; 20. String black holes in four and five dimensions; Appendix A. Lie groups, symmetric spaces and Yang-Mills fields; Appendix B. Gamma matrices and spinors; Appendix C. n-Spheres; Appendix D. Palatini's identity; Appendix E. Conformal rescalings; Appendix F. Connections and curvature components; Appendix G. The harmonic operator on R3 x S1; References; Index.

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A self-contained pedagogical exposition of the theory of quantum gravity provided by string theory, first published in 2004.

About the Author

Tomas Ortin completed his graduate studies and got his Ph.D. at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He then worked as a postdoctoral student in the Physics Department of Stanford University supported by a Spanish Government grant. Between 1993 and 1995, he was E.U. Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow in the String Theory Group of the Physics Department of Queen Mary, University of London, and from 1995 to 1997, Fellow in the Theory Division of CERN. He is currently Staff Scientist at the Spanish Research Council and member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. Dr Ortin has taught several graduate courses on advanced general relativity, supergravity and strings. His research interests lie in string theory, gravity, quantum gravity and black hole physics.