Professor Zwiebach’s “A First Course in String Theory” is the main textbook for this course, which we’ll loosely follow (and have assigned readings and problems taken from).

These notes are based on the string theory lecture course by Prof. Amihay Hanany, taught at Imperial College London in 2025. While they broadly follow the structure of the course, at times I decided to …

String theory builds on the conceptual foundations that have been established in elementary particle physics in the 1970s. It is a quantum theory that aims at reproducing the interaction and symmetry …

String theory is an attempt to quantise gravity and unite it with the other fundamental forces of nature. It combines many interesting topics of (quantum) eld theory in two and higher dimensions.

The notes have long been out of print, but over the years we had continuous positive feedback from students, who found the book helpful in their attempt to enter string theory. To make the book useful …

Here we use Newton’s law to derive a partial differential equation describing the motion of the string. We suppose the equilibrium configuration of the string lies along the x axis, and we let y(x, t) denote the …

We will use the model to find the string spectrum, first for open strings then closed. Spectrum? What spectrum? What distinguishes one string from another is the wave pattern on the string. Strings can …