When


Wed 22/10/2014    

15:00 - 16:00

Event Type

A new gravity-gauge dictionary

Abstract:

The idea of writing supergravity as a double copy of super Yang-Mills theories has
proved a fruitful one, most notably in the context of scattering amplitudes. I will
explore this idea of "squaring" at a fundamental level to explain how the symmetries
of the former(both local and global) can be written as a double copy of the latter.
I will show how the gravitational symmetries of general covariance, p-form gauge
invariance, local Lorentz invariance and local supersymmetry are obtained from the
flat space Yang-Mills symmetries of local gauge invariance and global
super-Poincare. We give a gravity-gauge dictionary by convoluting fields and
parameters. At the global level, I will explain how the coset groups of supergravity
can be derived from the global R-symmetries of the SYM multiplets, via the 4
division algebras:reals, complexes, quaternions and octonions. Finally I will
explore some intriguing possible applications of our dictonary.