## Monday, December 11, 2006

### Becker-Becker-Schwarz sold in Great Britain

The new fabulous string theory textbook by Becker, Becker, and Schwarz is now being sold in the United Kingdom. Amazon.co.uk offers it for 45 pounds and Amazon.de for 57 euros. And Amazon.ca for 62 Canadian dollars while Amazon.co.jp for 10,600 yens.

Every person interested in theoretical physics at the technical level should buy this important update of older books such as the two volumes by Green, Schwarz, Witten.

The icon here links to the American Amazon.com where the book is going to be available in a few weeks. If you pre-order it, amazon.com guarantees that if the price drops before the book is sold, you will pay the minimum. See a list of similar books on string theory.

First British impression

Hi Lubos, just a quick note to say I got my copy of Becker and Schwarz this morning. I have been thumbing through it. It is a beautiful book with a very clear style of presentation. I think the authors have done a great job. Sadly, there are only 24 hours in the day--nowhere near enough time for everything I have to do!--but I still hope to learn much new stuff from this book. Best regards and have a good holiday.

Via Dr. Steve Miller, thanks!

#### 1 comment:

1. Today there are another sources of weighty informations, too.
Look here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0612067

Quantum Entanglement of Baby Universes

Authors: Mina Aganagic, Hirosi Ooguri, Takuya Okuda

'We study quantum entanglements of baby universes which appear in non-perturbative corrections to the OSV formula for the entropy of extremal black holes in Type IIA string theory compactified on the local Calabi-Yau manifold defined as a rank 2 vector bundle over an arbitrary genus G Riemann surface. This generalizes the result for G=1 in hep-th/0504221. Non-perturbative terms can be organized into a sum over contributions from baby universes, and the total wave-function is their coherent superposition in the third quantized Hilbert space. We find that half of the universes preserve one set of supercharges while the other half preserve a different set, making the total universe stable but non-BPS. The parent universe generates baby universes by brane/anti-brane pair creation, and baby universes are correlated by conservation of non-normalizable D-brane charges under the process. There are no other source of entanglement of baby universes, and all possible states are superposed with the equal weight.'

and

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0612073

Gauge Theory, Ramification, And The Geometric Langlands Program

Authors: Sergei Gukov, Edward Witten

'In the gauge theory approach to the geometric Langlands program, ramification can be described in terms of surface operators,'' which are supported on two-dimensional surfaces somewhat as Wilson or 't Hooft operators are supported on curves. We describe the relevant surface operators in N=4 super Yang-Mills theory, and the parameters they depend on, and analyze how S-duality acts on these parameters. Then, after compactifying on a Riemann surface, we show that the hypothesis of S-duality for surface operators leads to a natural extension of the geometric Langlands program for the case of tame ramification. The construction involves an action of the affine Weyl group on the cohomology of the moduli space of Higgs bundles with ramification, and an action of the affine braid group on A-branes or B-branes on this space.'

Best planckeon