Strings, Branes and Extra Dimensions

TL;DR

This review discusses the fundamental aspects of strings and branes, their roles in dualities, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and implications for cosmology and particle physics, highlighting recent developments and open issues.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of string and brane theories, connecting perturbative approaches to supergravity vacua and exploring their applications in modern theoretical physics.

Findings

Branes include orbifold fixed planes, D-branes, and orientifold planes.

Branes play a key role in string dualities and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Warped compactifications impact gravitational interactions and the cosmological constant.

Abstract

This review is devoted to strings and branes. Firstly, perturbative string theory is introduced. The appearance of various types of branes is discussed. These include orbifold fixed planes, D-branes and orientifold planes. The connection to BPS vacua of supergravity is presented afterwards. As applications, we outline the role of branes in string dualities, field theory dualities, the AdS/CFT correspondence and scenarios where the string scale is at a TeV. Some issues of warped compactifications are also addressed. These comprise corrections to gravitational interactions as well as the cosmological constant problem.