Related papers: Spacelike Singularities and Hidden Symmetries of G…
The unexpected and fascinating emergence of hyperbolic Coxeter groups and Lorentzian Kac-Moody algebras in the investigation of gravitational theories in the vicinity of a cosmological singularity is briefly reviewed. Some open questions…
D=11 Supergravity near a space-like singularity admits a cosmological billiard description based on the hyperbolic Kac-Moody group E10. The quantization of this system via the supersymmetry constraint is shown to lead to wavefunctions…
The structure of the general, inhomogeneous solution of (bosonic) Einstein-matter systems in the vicinity of a cosmological singularity is considered. We review the proof (based on ideas of Belinskii-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz and technically…
We compute the billiards that emerge in the Belinskii-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz (BKL) limit for all pure supergravities in D=4 spacetime dimensions, as well as for D=4, N=4 supergravities coupled to k (N=4) Maxwell supermultiplets. We find that…
In this thesis, we consider several aspects of over-extended and very-extended Kac-Moody algebras in relation with theories of gravity coupled to matter. In the first part, we focus on the occurrence of KM algebras in the cosmological…
The structure of the general, inhomogeneous solution of (bosonic) Einstein-matter systems in the vicinity of a cosmological singularity is considered. We review the proof (based on ideas of Belinskii-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz and technically…
We review the recently discovered connection between the Belinsky-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz-like ``chaotic'' structure of generic cosmological singularities in eleven-dimensional supergravity and the ``last'' hyperbolic Kac-Moody algebra E(10).…
In recent papers, it has been shown that (i) the dynamics of theories involving gravity can be described, in the vicinity of a spacelike singularity, as a billiard motion in a region of hyperbolic space bounded by hyperplanes; and (ii) that…
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…
We study the quantum fermionic billiard defined by the dynamics of a quantized supersymmetric squashed three-sphere (Bianchi IX cosmological model within D=4 simple supergravity). The quantization of the homogeneous gravitino field leads to…
It is shown that the never ending oscillatory behaviour of the generic solution, near a cosmological singularity, of the massless bosonic sector of superstring theory can be described as a billiard motion within a simplex in 9-dimensional…
We study the "fermionic billiards", i.e. the chaotic dynamics of the gravitino, that arise in the near-spacelike-singularity limit of eleven-dimensional supergravity and of its dimensional truncations (notably four-dimensional simple…
Recent work has revealed intriguing connections between a Belinsky-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz-type analysis of spacelike singularities in General Relativity and certain infinite dimensional Lie algebras, and in particular the `maximally extended'…
We study the quantum dynamics of a supersymmetric squashed three-sphere by dimensionally reducing (to one timelike dimension) the action of D=4 simple supergravity for an SO(3)-homogeneous (Bianchi IX) cosmological model. The quantization…
Some time ago, it was found that the never-ending oscillatory chaotic behaviour discovered by Belinsky, Khalatnikov and Lifshitz (BKL) for the generic solution of the vacuum Einstein equations in the vicinity of a spacelike ("cosmological")…
The hyperbolic Kac-Moody algebra E10 has repeatedly been suggested to play a crucial role in the symmetry structure of M-theory. Recently, following the analysis of the asymptotic behaviour of the supergravity fields near a cosmological…
We review the recently discovered interplay between chaos and symmetry in the general inhomogeneous solution of many string-related Einstein-matter systems in the vicinity of a cosmological singularity. The…
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…
A description of the bosonic sector of ten-dimensional N=1 supergravity as a non-linear realisation is given. We show that if a suitable extension of this theory were invariant under a Kac-Moody algebra, then this algebra would have to…
In an earlier paper we studied the infinite-dimensional symmetries of symmetric-space sigma models (SSMs) in a flat two-dimensional spacetime. Here, we extend our investigation to the case of two-dimensional SSMs coupled to gravity. These…