Related papers: Higher Derivative Gravitation in Superstrings
This PhD thesis investigates several aspects of nonabelian higher gauge theories, which appear in many areas of physics, notably string theory and gauged supergravity. We show that nonabelian higher gauge theory admits a consistent…
A gauge-symmetric approach to effective Lagrangians is described with special emphasis on derivations of effective low-energy Lagrangians from QCD. The examples we discuss are based on exact rewritings of cut-off QCD in terms of new…
Higher-order invariants and their role as possible counterterms for supergravity theories are reviewed. It is argued that N=8 supergravity will diverge at 5 loops. The construction of $R^4$ superinvariants in string and M-theory is…
The general Lagrangian for maximal supergravity in five spacetime dimensions is presented with vector potentials in the \bar{27} and tensor fields in the 27 representation of E_6. This novel tensor-vector system is subject to an intricate…
The general seven-dimensional maximal supergravity is presented. Its universal Lagrangian is described in terms of an embedding tensor which can be characterized group-theoretically. The theory generically combines vector, two-form and…
General Lagrangians are constructed for N=2 conformal supergravity theories in four space-time dimensions involving gauge groups with abelian and/or non-abelian electric and magnetic charges. The charges are encoded in the gauge group…
We describe some of the novel 6d quantum field theories which have been discovered in studies of string duality. The role these theories (and their 4d descendants) may play in alleviating the vacuum degeneracy problem in string theory is…
We study the number of propagating degrees of freedom, at non-linear order, in torsion gravity theories, a class of modified theories of gravity that include a propagating torsion in addition to the metric. We focus on a three-parameter…
We investigate the cosmological applications of new gravitational scalar-tensor theories, which are novel modifications of gravity possessing 2+2 propagating degrees of freedom, arising from a Lagrangian that includes the Ricci scalar and…
In this model, the gravity term in the Lagrangean comes from spontaneous symmetry breaking of an additional scalar quadruplet field $\Upsilon$. The resulting gravitational field is approximate to one of the models of coframe gravity with…
A new four-dimensional $N=1$ superfield model is suggested. The model is induced by supertrace anomaly of matter superfields in curved superspace and leads to effective theory of supergravity chiral compensator. A renormalization structure…
As an alternative to the covariant Ostrogradski method, we show that higher-derivative relativistic Lagrangian field theories can be reduced to second differential-order by writing them directly as covariant two-derivative theories…
It has been conjectured that there exists an E11-invariant formulation of eleven-dimensional supergravity in which the propagating fields of the theory are realised through an infinite tower of higher duals. In this work, we prove this…
Gauged off-shell Maxwell-Einstein supergravity in six dimensions with N=(1,0) supersymmetry has a higher derivative extension afforded by a supersymmetrized Riemann squared term. This theory admits a supersymmetric Minkowski x S^2…
Superconformal methods are useful to build invariant actions in supergravity. We have a good insight in the possibilities of actions that are at most quadratic in spacetime derivatives, but insight in general higher-derivative actions is…
We consider the possible consistent truncation of N-extended supergravities to lower N' theories. The truncation, unlike the case of N-extended rigid theories, is non trivial and only in some cases it is sufficient just to delete the extra…
It is shown that a 4D N=1 softly broken supersymmetric theory with higher derivative operators in the Kahler or the superpotential part of the Lagrangian and with an otherwise arbitrary superpotential, can be re-formulated as a theory…
We describe a new first-order formulation of D=11 supergravity which shows that that theory can be understood to arise from a certain topological field theory by the imposition of a set of local constraints on the fields, plus a lagrange…
Hierarchies of Lagrangians of degree two, each only partly determined by the choice of leading terms and with some coefficients remaining free, are considered. The free coefficients they contain satisfy the most general differential…
Motivated by Ooguri and Vafa, we study superstrings in flat R^4 in a constant self-dual graviphoton background. The supergravity equations of motion are satisfied in this background which deforms the N=2 d=4 flat space super-Poincare…