Etudes on D-Branes

Abstract

This is a short arrangement of notes on D-branes, offered as an embellishment of five lectures which were presented at the 1998 Trieste Spring School entitled ``Non-Perturbative Aspects of String Theory and Supersymmetric Gauge Theory''. There is a good number of collections of pedagogical notes on D-branes in the literature, and since space here is limited, no attempt will be made to cover all of the introductory material again. Instead, the notes cover selected topics and themes in string theory and M-theory, emphasizing how certain technical aspects of D-branes play a role. The subject is developed mainly from the perspective of non-perturbative string theory, touching on aspects of the old matrix model, string duality, the new matrix model, the AdS/CFT correspondence and other gauge theory/geometry correspondences.