Supergravedad estándard en D=11 como teoría de Chern-Simons

por Fernando Izaurieta (Univ. Católica de la Stma. Concepción, Chile)

martes 28 jun. 2011 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Madrid

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

We probe the relationship between two supergravity theories in eleven-dimensional spacetime: the “standard” 1978 theory of Cremmer, Julia and Scherk (CJS) and osp(32|1)-based Chern–Simons (CS) supergravity, as first put forward by Troncoso and Zanelli in 1997. The comparison is carried out at the Lagrangian level for both theories, which is nontrivial because, when written in a way suitable for our purposes, the CS Lagrangian has roughly a thousand terms. We find that the CS Lagrangian can be cast as a polynomial in 1/l, where l is a length, and that the CJS Lagrangian may appear only as one distinct term. For the particular case when the CJS three-form A3 and the CS five-index one-form vanish, the match between both Lagrangians turns out to be almost complete. This matching sheds new light on the long-standing issue of the gauge-theory structure of CJS supergravity, since the CS supergravity Lagrangian defines a true gauge system in the fiber-bundle sense. We also provide a general ansatz for A3 in terms of the CS fields. Solving the full comparison, with nonvanishing A3 and babcde, is important in deciding which rôle could CS supergravity theories play in the context of M Theory.