Related papers: Cosmological Singularities and a Conjectured Gravi…
In this thesis we summarize the reformulation of the bosonic sector of eleven dimensional supergravity as a simultaneous nonlinear realisation based on the conformal group and an enlarged affine group called G11. The vielbein and the gauge…
Close to a spacelike singularity, pure gravity and supergravity in four to eleven spacetime dimensions admit a cosmological billiard description based on hyperbolic Kac-Moody groups. We investigate the quantum cosmological billiards of…
In this thesis we study algebraic structures in M-theory, in particular the exceptional Lie algebras arising in dimensional reduction of its low energy limit, eleven-dimensional supergravity. We focus on e8 and its infinite-dimensional…
We review the recently constructed non-trivial fermionic representations of the infinite-dimensional subalgebra K(E10) of the hyperbolic Kac--Moody algebra E10. These representations are all unfaithful (and more specifically, of finite…
We examine in a cosmological context the conditions for unbroken supersymmetry in N=1 supergravity in D=10 dimensions. We show that the cosmological solutions of the equations of motion obtained considering only the bosonic sector…
Nature's attraction to unique mathematical structures provides powerful hints for unraveling her mysteries. None is at present as intriguing as eleven-dimensional M-theory. The search for exceptional structures specific to eleven dimensions…
We establish a dynamical equivalence between the bosonic part of pure type I supergravity in D=10 and a D=1 non-linear sigma-model on the Kac-Moody coset space DE(10)/K(DE(10)) if both theories are suitably truncated. To this end we make…
Recently, the concept of a nonlinear sigma-model over a coset space G/H was generalized to the case where the group G is an infinite-dimensional Kac-Moody group, and H its (formal) `maximal compact subgroup'. Here, we study in detail the…
We re-examine previously found cosmological solutions to eleven-dimensional supergravity in the light of the E_{10}-approach to M-theory. We focus on the solutions with non zero electric field determined by geometric configurations (n_m,…
The algebra A(D-3)+++ dimensionally reduces to the E(D-1) symmetry algebra of (12-D)-dimensional supergravity. An infinite set of five-dimensional gravitational objects trivially embedded in D-dimensions is constructed by identifying the…
In the conjectured correspondence between supergravity and geodesic models on infinite-dimensional hyperbolic coset spaces, and E10/K(E10) in particular, the constraints play a central role. We present a Sugawara-type construction in terms…
We review recent work on the existence and nature of cosmological singularities that can be formed during the evolution of generic as well as specific cosmological spacetimes in general relativity. We first discuss necessary and sufficient…
We construct simple exact solutions to the E10/K(E10) coset model by exploiting its integrability. Using the known correspondences with the bosonic sectors of maximal supergravity theories, these exact solutions translate into exact…
Recent progress in understanding the structure of cosmological singularities is reviewed. The well-known picture due to Belinskii, Khalatnikov and Lifschitz (BKL) is summarized briefly and it is discussed what existing analytical and…
A lot of developments made during the last years show that Kac-Moody algebras play an important role in the algebraic structure of some supergravity theories. These algebras would generate infinite-dimensional symmetry groups. The possible…
It seems to me at this time that two recent developments may permit fast progress on our way to understand the symmetry structure of toroidally (compactified and) reduced M-theory. The first indication of a (possibly) thin spot in the wall…
We explain how to achieve the traceless gauge for the spatial part of the spin connection in the framework of the recently proposed correspondence between the (appropriately truncated) bosonic sectors of maximal supergravities and the…
We study the nature of a family of curvature singularities which are precisely the timelike cousins of the spacelike singularities studied by Belinski, Khalatnikov, and Lifshitz (BKL). We show that the approach to the singularity can be…
We investigate the coset structures which appear in the dimensional reduction of supergravity theories. Especially we investigate how to recognize the global symmetry groups if the coset is non-split. As an example we apply our analysis to…
We analyse the M-theoretic generalisation of the tangent space structure group after reduction of the D=11 supergravity theory to two space-time dimensions in the context of hidden Kac-Moody symmetries. The action of the resulting…