Iberian Strings Meetings 

18/01/2017, 13:00 — 13:30 — Abreu Faro Amphitheatre
John Huerta, Instituto Superior Técnico Lisbon

M-theory from the superpoint

One mysterious facet of M-theory is how a 10-dimensional string theory can "grow an extra dimension" to become 11-dimensional M-theory. Physically, the process is understood via brane condensation. Mathematically, Fiorenza, Sati, and Schreiber have proposed that brane condensation coincides with extending superspacetime, viewed as a Lie superalgebra, by the cocycle in Lie algebra cohomology which encodes the brane's WZW term. The resulting extension can be regarded as an "extended superspacetime'' where still other super p-branes may live, whose condensates yield further extensions, and so on. In this way, all the super p-branes of string theory and M-theory fit into a hierarchy called "the brane bouquet". In this talk, we show how the brane bouquet grows out of the simplest kind of supermanifold, the superpoint.

This is joint work with Urs Schreiber.

See also

superpoint_talk_huerta.pdf