## Sunday, December 17, 2006 ... //

### Supersymmetry and String Theory: Beyond the Standard Model

Michael Dine has written a book that will almost certainly become a new standard for all high-energy theorists who care about reality.

The 536 pages for \$80 (Amazon.com guarantees the lowest price if you pre-order) that will be sold within weeks (and earlier in Great Britain) introduce the reader not only to field theory, the Standard Model, supersymmetry, grand unification, non-perturbative physics of gauge theory, and string theory. They not only answer all of her questions about the strong CP problem, the hierarchy problem, proton decay, anomaly cancellation, monopoles, technicolor.

They also show how supersymmetric gauge theories - and especially the MSSM - are constructed, how they behave for different numbers of flavors, how supersymmetry is broken, how N=2 supersymmetric theories can be solved. They also tell the beginner everything she wants to know about general relativity, cosmology, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, and astroparticle physics.

The second half of the book presents string theory in the usual theorists' fashion, with bosonic string theory, superstring theory, and compactification, but it also teaches you much more about the string-theoretical phenomenology than other string theory books. Large extra dimensions and warped extra dimensions are not missing. The appendices focus on spinors, mesons, and path integrals.

You can read parts of the book - not just the table of contents - via books.google.com. The book is very concise, highly recommended, and you must have it.

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