All students should bring copies of Polchinski (vols 1,2) and Green-Schwarz-Witten (vols 1,2). Additional references for the lectures are described below.

First Week

Barton Zwiebach (Introduction to the Bosonic String)

1) Introduction, light-cone open strings (Veneziano model); 2) light-cone closed strings, orbifold R/Z_2; 3) CFT methods, Matter and ghost CFT; 4) BRST charge, BRST cohomology, vertex operators; 5) String amplitudes; 6) Strings in curved backgrounds.

Zwiebach (second edition), chapters 12 and 13; Ginsparg Les Houches lectures; Polchinski volume 1.

Nathan Berkovits (Introduction to the Superstring)

1) Spinning particle, worldsheet superconformal invariance, spinning string; 2) Ramond-Neveu-Schwarz spectrum, GSO projection: 3) Picture-changing, superstring amplitudes; 4) Light-cone GS, covariant GS and pure spinor description.

Polchinski Vol. II, Chapters 10 and 12; Green-Schwarz-Witten Vol. I, Chapters 4,5; D. Friedan, E. Martinec and S. Shenker, Nucl. Phys. B271 (1986) 93; N. Berkovits, hep-th/0209059.

Seif Randjbar-Daemi (Supersymmetry and Supergravity)

First few chapters of Wess and Bagger's book on supersymmetry.

George Thompson (Differential geometry)

Chapters 12,13 and 14 of Green, Schwarz and Witten

Second Week

Joe Polchinski (Introduction to D-branes)

Polchinski Vol 1: chapter 8, Vol II: chapter 13.

David Berenstein (Introduction to AdS-CFT)

J. Maldacena, http://arXiv.org/abs/hep-th/9711200; E. Witten, http://arXiv.org/abs/hep-th/9802150; E. D'Hoker and D. Freedman, http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0201253.

Kumar Narain (Duality and M-theory)

Chapters 11 and 14 of Polchinski.

Fernando Quevedo (String Phenomenology)

hep-th/9603074 (Lectures on superstring phenomenology); 2003 ICTP lectures; First six chapters of E. Kiritsis review (D-branes in standard model building, gravity and cosmology, hep-th/0310001).

Third Week

Juan Maldacena (Advanced topics)

Integrability in N=4 SYM and the corresponding string theory:
1) 1/2 BPS operators like Tr[Z^J] for large J and small excitations around it.
2) Impurities on the 1/2 BPS operators and magnons, symmetries, SU(2|2)^2 , etc.
3) The Beisert S-matrix and phase factor
4) The cusp anomalous dimension
5) Short discussion on TBA and other operators.
6) Scattering amplitudes at strong coupling.
7) Wilson loop amplitude duality
8) Minimal surfaces and Y system.
PiTP lectures: http://www.sns.ias.edu/pitp/2010files/schedule2010_v2.html
Alday and Maldacena on Scattering amplitudes: http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.0303

Freddy Cachazo (Twistor methods)

L. J. Dixon, ``Calculating scattering amplitudes efficiently,'' arXiv:hep-ph/9601359; N. Arkani-Hamed, F. Cachazo and J. Kaplan, ``What is the Simplest Quantum Field Theory?,'' JHEP 1009, 016 (2010) [arXiv:0808.1446 [hep-th]]; N. Arkani-Hamed, J. L. Bourjaily, F. Cachazo, S. Caron-Huot and J. Trnka, ``The All-Loop Integrand For Scattering Amplitudes in Planar N=4 SYM,'' [arXiv:1008.2958 [hep-th]].