General Relativity: A Graduate Course - Hardcover

Nastase, Horatiu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009575759 ISBN 13: 9781009575751

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2025

Synopsis

This text on general relativity and its modern applications is suitable for an intensive one-semester course on general relativity, at the level of a Ph.D. student in physics. Assuming knowledge of classical mechanics and electromagnetism at an advanced undergraduate level, basic concepts are introduced quickly, with greater emphasis on their applications. Standard topics are covered, such as the Schwarzschild solution, classical tests of general relativity, gravitational waves, ADM parametrization, relativistic stars and cosmology, as well as more advanced standard topics like vielbein-spin connection formulation, trapped surfaces, the Raychaudhuri equation, energy conditions, the Petrov and Bianchi classifications and gravitational instantons. More modern topics, including black hole thermodynamics, gravitational entropy, effective field theory for gravity, the PPN expansion, the double copy and fluid-gravity correspondence, are also introduced using the language understood by physicists, without too abstract mathematics, proven theorems, or the language of pure mathematics.

About this title

About the Author

Horațiu Năstase is a researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, State University of São Paulo. He completed his Ph.D. at Stony Brook with Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, co-discoverer of supergravity. While in Princeton as a postdoc, in a 2002 paper with David Berenstein and Juan Maldacena, he started the pp-wave correspondence, a sub-area of the AdS/CFT correspondence. He has written more than 100 scientific articles and 7 other books: Introduction to the AdS/CFT Correspondence (2015), String Theory Methods for Condensed Matter Physics (2017), Classical Field Theory (2019), Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (2019), Cosmology and String Theory (2019), Quantum Mechanics: A Graduate Course (2022) and Supergravity (2024).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009575759
• ISBN 13: 9781009575751
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400