Lectures from the European RTN Winter School on Strings, Supergravity and Gauge Fields, Barcelona, 12-16 January 2004
Jorge G. Russo · Classical and Quantum Gravity · 2005
This issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity contains the proceedings of the RTN European Winter School on Strings, Supergravity and Gauge Fields, which was held at the University of Barcelona, Spain, between 12-16 January 2004. The School was part of the RTN programme The Quantum Structure of Spacetime and the Geometric Nature of Fundamental Interactions of the European Union. It was attended by 181 registered participants. The lectures contain a pedagogical introduction to topics in string theory which are currently under active investigation. They were targeted mainly at students near the end of their PhD, and young postdocs and researchers. The topics were carefully selected to cover phenomenological aspects of string theory, covered by the lectures by A Uranga (Intersecting Brane Worlds) and U Danielsson (String Theory and Cosmology), as well as more fundamental and theoretical issues, covered by N Nekrasov (Non-perturbative Aspects of Supersymmetric Gauge Theories), P Townsend (Branes in Field Theory, not included in these proceedings) and Jaume Gomis (Tachyon Condensation: Towards Time Dependent Backgrounds and Holography). We must thank the lecturers for their admirable exposition of these interesting subjects. We hope that the readers of these proceedings receive these lectures with the same enthusiasm as they were received by all students and physicists that attended the School. Following the tradition of the RTN schools there were, in addition to the lectures, five workgroups on more specialized subjects, which aimed to discuss scientific problems of general interest to our network, facilitate communication between the various groups and, hopefully, help start new collaborations. They were Integrable Structures of the Gauge/String Correspondence led by G Arutyunov and B Stefanski Closed Timelike Curves in Supergravity and String Theory led by N Drukker and L Maoz Black Objects in Higher Dimensional General Relativity and Supergravity led by H Elvang and T Harmark N=1/2 Supersymmetric Theories led by W Mueck E10 and E11 as M-theory Symmetries led by A Keurentjes. As expected, these workgroups produced many stimulating and enlightening discussions. The School was financed by the RTN, the University of Barcelona, ICREA and the Generalitat de Catalunya. The local organizers were R Emparan, Joaquim Gomis, T Mateos, P K Townsend and myself. The Scientific Board were E Imeroni (Universiteit Utrecht), A Lerda (Universita del Piemonte Orientale), M Lledo (Universitat de Valencia), D Lust (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin), K Stelle (Imperial College London), A Van Proeyen (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven), P Di Vecchia (Nordita, Copenhagen) and D Zanon (Universita di Milano 1). We thank all of them and especially the participants for making the School possible.