This book provides a self-contained presentation of supergravity theories from its fundamentals to its most recent union with string and superstring theories, w

A unified theory embracing all physical phenomena is a major goal of theoretical physics. In the early 1980s, many physicists looked to eleven-dimensional super

Based on courses given at the CRM Banff summer school in 1999, this volume provides a snapshot of topics engaging theoretical physicists at the end of the twent

Many of the topics in this book are outgrowths of the spectacular new understanding of duality in string theory which emerged around 1995. They include the AdS/