Chern-Simons Forms and Supergravities in D = 11

por Fernando Izaurieta (Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, Concepción, Chile)

martes 2 dic. 2008 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

Sala Seminarios (Dpto. de Física Teórica (UVEG))

It has been pointed out several times in the past that eleven-dimensional Chern-Simons Supergravity would make a natural candidate for M Theory, due to its appealing good behaviour as a gauge theory. However, according to our current understanding of String Theory and M Theory, in that case it should be possible to recover standard Cremmer-Julia-Scherk Supergravity as some kind of limit of Chern-Simons Supergravity. All efforts notwithstanding the issue remains open until now. Solving this problem turns out to be a relevant consistency condition, necessary to test whether in fact, a Chern-Simons Supergravity theory could provide us with a consistent action principle for M Theory. A possible solution to the problem could be to compare not the dynamics of both theories but directly their action principles. Perhaps standard supergravity could correspond to a sector of a Chern–Simons theory in d = 11, where other terms in the action could correspond to higher order corrections in a lenght parameter