BTSM Review Papers: Guide to Navigating Research Fields

[S.Daedalus]

It's difficult, especially for an outsider, to keep track of the multifaceted development of modern physics -- to even maintain a broad overview of research fields and directions, much less keep on top of the details. Review papers, I think, provide a good starting point to familiarize oneself broadly with the main developments of a research programme; they can provide a map to a territory otherwise difficult to navigate. But hunting for the appropriate (and sufficiently current) papers online and elsewhere can be quite time consuming.

To this end, I thought it would be nice to have a collection available for quick reference, so that next time I think 'hmm, what was asymptotic safety all about, again?' I can just open up this thread, find the right paper, and jump in. Thus the idea is that everybody interested just supplies a link to one or more papers detailing the current state and development of whatever research programmes they might be interested in, perhaps with some explanation if it's not clear from the title what the paper is about. I'd like to keep the definition of 'review paper' rather broad for present purposes -- occasionally, you encounter a paper presenting a specific result, which nevertheless contains such a clear overview of the field that you keep it around as more of a reference and guide rather than on account of its other merits. I also don't wish to clearly delineate the definition of 'research field' -- everything goes, from the breadth of 'string theory' to more narrow sub fields. However, I think it'd be good if the presentation does not start out too involved -- a review is of no use if one needs to be intimately familiar with the field already to understand it --, and if the article includes a good amount of references for further study.

Unfortunately, I can only think of two articles offhand to start this thing off; both are maybe not quite up to date (I'd welcome updates), but they're the most recent ones I read:

• http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602037" -- Polchinski, Horowitz: As the name says, it's about AdS/CFT and its extensions
• http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0101126" -- Taylor: About matrix models of M- and string theory

 

[atyy]

The AdS/CFT article is part of a book edited by Oriti. Most of the book is on the archive. Search for papers with "Oriti" in their comments.

 

[unusualname]

Introduction to ADS-CFT

there are quite a few review articles on arXiv, it would be nice have links.

 

[S.Daedalus]

A few more:

• http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.0489" -- Brief review of NCG for a general audience
• http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.0464" -- More serious, in-depth review by Connes and Chamseddine
• http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5582" -- Recent review of Causal Dynamical Triangulations (haven't really had a look at it yet, though)
• http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1556" -- Probably one of my favourite papers ever; lucid and insightful (well, it's Baez) presentation of the patterns and structures that lie beneath the standard model, and how they may hint at grand unification