INTRODUCTION TO D-BRANES, WITH APPLICATIONS

A brief review of some of the central ideas, terminology and technique s of the technology of orientifolds and D-branes is presented. Some ap plications are reviewed, including the construction of dual solitonic strings in the context of string/string duality, the computation of th e Bekenstien-Hawking entropy/area law for extremal black holes, and th e construction of N=1 string vacua in dimensions lower than ten.