Regular Seminar Christopher Pope (Texas A and M University)
at: 15:00 room IMS Seminar Room abstract: | The global symmetry groups that result from compactifying eleven-dimensional supergravity on an n-dimensional torus play a central role in our understanding of U-dualities in string and M-theory. The mechanism leading to the En Lie algebra upon compactification on Tn is well-known for n less than 9, but the situation for n=9, corresponding to the compactification to 2 dimensions, has been described much less clearly in the literature. We give an elementary, and completely explicit, description of the infinite-dimensional symmetries of all symmetric-space coset models in 2-dimensional gravitational backgrounds, including symmetries of both Kac-Moody and Virasoro type. |