Introduction to M Theory and AdS/CFT Duality

John H. Schwarz

Published 1998-12-04, updated 1998-12-11Version 2

An introductory survey of some of the developments that have taken place in superstring theory in the past few years is presented. The main focus is on three particular dualities. The first one is the appearance of an 11th dimension in the strong coupling limit of the type IIA theory, which give rise to M theory. The second one is the duality between the type IIB theory compactified on a circle and M theory on a two-torus. The final topic is an introduction to the recently proposed duality between superstring theory or M theory on certain anti de Sitter space backgrounds and conformally invariant quantum field theories.