Topics in black holes and string theory
Arvind Rajaraman · CERN Document Server (European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 1998
Part I. Investigations of the Matrix Model Proposal for M-theory. The Matrix Model is a proposed formulation of M-theory, which in turn is the fundamental eleven-dimensional theory underlying string theory. In the first chapter, we review the evidence for the Matrix Model proposal. In the second chapter, we analyze compactifications of the Matrix Model and the relation to compactified M-theory. We find that this correspondence provides many new results about the strong coupling behaviour of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories. We discuss the results obtained for maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in dimensions 1 through 6. We find novel features like the opening up of new dimensions in the limit of strong coupling. In the next chapter, we consider a more complicated compactification of the matrix model on an ALE space, in which the background is not toroidal. We show that the features of the matrix model are in agreement with string theory on the ALE space, thus providing further evidence for the matrix model proposal...