Type II supergravity as a string theory

par Prof. David SKINNER (DAMTP, University of Cambridge)

mercredi 8 janv. 2014, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Paris

Amphitéâtre Léon Motchane (IHES)

Ten dimensional supergravities are well-known to arise as low-energy limits of string theory. I will show that in fact, these pure supergravities are complete string theories in their own right. The strings in question describe holomorphic maps to the space of null geodesics in complexified space-time, known as ambitwistor space, and have no massive states in their spectrum. Worldsheet correlators describe scattering amplitudes in pure supergravity, in a form found recently by Cachazo, He & Yuan, in which the integral over the moduli space of marked curves is localized to solutions of the Gross-Mende equations.