Les Houches Lectures on Indirect Detection of Dark Matter

Les Houches Lectures on Strings and Arithmetic∗

These are lecturenotes for two lectures delivered at the Les Houches workshop on Number Theory, Physics, and Geometry, March 2003. They review two examples of interesting interactions between number theory and string compactification, and raise some new questions and issues in the context of those examples. The first example concerns the role of the Rademacher expansion of coefficients of modul...

Les Houches Lectures on Constructing String Vacua

These lectures give a detailed introduction to constructing and analyzing string vacua suitable for phenomenological model building, with particular emphasis on F-theory flux vacua. Topics include (1) general challenges and overview of some proposed scenarios, (2) an extensive introduction to F-theory and its relation to M-theory and perturbative IIB string theory, (3) F-theory flux vacua and m...

Les Houches Lectures on Black Holes

Les Houches Lectures on Warped Models and Holography

The theoretical tools required to construct models in warped extra dimensions are presented. This includes how to localise zero modes in the warped bulk and how to obtain the holographic interpretation using the AdS/CFT correspondence. Several models formulated in warped space are then discussed including nonsupersymmetric and supersymmetric theories as well as their dual interpretation. Finall...

Les Houches lectures on matrix models and topological strings

In these lecture notes for the Les Houches School on Applications of Random Matrices in Physics we give an introduction to the connections between matrix models and topological strings. We first review some basic results of matrix model technology and then we focus on type B topological strings. We present the main results of Dijkgraaf and Vafa describing the spacetime string dynamics on certai...