Monday, May 7, 2007

E11 and the mother of all supergravities

Peter West and Fabio Riccioni argue that the probes in lower-dimensional supergravities and/or the antisymmetric tensor fields - objects that are normally derived from supersymmetry - can also be equivalently derived from the more-than-hyperbolic E11 symmetry in 11 dimensions. They think that it means that all components of the complicated E11 representations have a physical meaning, and finally speculate about a possible link with the mysterious duality.