2003/11/30 by F. Englert, Laurent Houart, L. Houart · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2004/01/002
published as JHEP0401:002,2004 · Latex 45 pages, 1 figure. Discussion on pages 19 and 20 altered. Appendix B amplified. 4 footnotes added. 2 references added. Acknowledgments updated. Additional minor corrections
arxiv created 2003/12/15 · openalex publication_date 2004/01/06 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
We present a tentative formulation of theories of gravity with suitable matter content, including in particular pure gravity in D dimensions, the bosonic effective actions of M-theory and of the bosonic string, in terms of actions invariant under very-extended Kac-Moody algebras G+++. We conjecture that they host additional degrees of freedom not contained in the conventional theories. The actions are constructed in a recursive way from a level expansion for all very-extended algebras G+++. They constitute non-linear realisations on cosets, a priori unrelated to space-time, obtained from a modified Chevalley involution. Exact solutions are found for all G+++. They describe the algebraic properties of BPS extremal branes, Kaluza-Klein waves and Kaluza-Klein monopoles. They illustrate the generalisation to all G+++ invariant theories of the well-known duality properties of string theories by expressing duality as Weyl invariance in G+++. Space-time is expected to be generated dynamically. In the level decomposition of E8+++ = E11, one may indeed select an A10 representation of generators Pa which appears to engender space-time translations by inducing infinite towers of fields interpretable as field derivatives in space and time.