The Advancea Kesearch Workshop on Superstrings was held on the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder from July 27th through August 1, 1987. Since the work of Green and Schwartz in the summer of 1984, string theories have elicited tremendous amount of interest from both theoretical physicists and mathematicians. The objective of the Workshop was to bring together practitioners in the field to discuss the progress and problems, and possible directions of future research. There were ten talks of one hour each and twenty three talks of one-half hour each. The talks covered new formulations and technical developments. There were intense discussions both during and at the end of the lectures; 'further discussions continued during lunch and dinner. These proceedings contain all talks given at the Workshop except those by Victor Kac, Darwin Chang and Doron Gepner. The Workshop was sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which provided generous financial support enabling many young physicists from the U.S. and abroad to participate in the Workshop. Additional co-sponsors were the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Colorado. The former offered further financial assistance and the latter furnished clerical and technical services and its campus facilities for the purpose of the organization and running of the Workshop. The International Organizing Committee consisted of John Ellis, Francois Englert, Peter G.O. Freund (co-director), K. T. Mahanthappa (co-director) and Abdus Salam.

Inhalt

I: Mathematical Techniques.- Modular Invariance and Infine-Dimensional Algebras.- Off-Shell BRST Invariant Superjacobians.- II: String Field Theory.- A Geometry Independent Field Theory of String.- The Gluing Theorem in the Operator Formulation of String Field Theory.- Conformai Field Theory Methods and Construction of Witten's Superstring Field Theory.- Gauge Invariance, BRST Invariance, and Ward Identities in String Field Theory.- Closed Strings and Witten's String Field Theory.- Geometric String Field Theory: Deriving String Theory from First Principles.- On Higher Order Interactions for Superstrings.- III: String Geometry and Arithmetic.- Kähler Geometry of String Theory.- Numbers and Strings.- IV: Compactification and Phenomenology.- Type II Superstrings in Four Dimensions.- Four-Dimensional Strings.- String Thermodynamics and Cosmology.- Orbifold Compactification toward Standard Model.- V: Polyakov Strings.- Liouville Strings.- A Polyakov Path Integral with Ghosts.- String Path Integrals for Open or Unoriented World Sheets.- VI: Loops.- Two Loop Partition Function in (Compactified) Heterotic String Vacua.- String Perturbation Theory and Effective Lagrangians.- VII: Anomalies and Chiral Bosonization.- Chiral Bosonization.- Superstring Anomalies.- Toplogy, Superspace, and Heterotic Gravitational Anomalies.- Anomaly-Free Theories Remain Anomaly-Free after Compactification with No Isometries.- Many New Anomaly-Free Theories in Higher Dimensions.- VIII: Supermembranes and Other Alternatives.- Supermembranes.- On the Massless Excitations of The 11d Supermembrane.- Highlights of Parastring Theories.- Line Functional Theory for Strings.- Internal Symmetry for Type II Strings in Oscillator Formalism.- Participants.