QG seminar: An overview of the E11 program

QG unit seminar.
Speaker: Keith Glennon (King's College London).
Title: An overview of the E11 program.

In this talk we will discuss the claim that the low energy effective action of the theory of strings and branes possesses an E11 Kac-Moody symmetry. We will show that a certain non-linear realization of E11, when suitably truncated, reproduces the equations of motion of eleven-dimensional supergravity, and that different decompositions leads to all the maximal supergravity theories, while the non-linear realization also contains effects beyond the supergravity approximation, indicating that E11 is a symmetry of the theory of strings and branes. We will discuss how this forces one to extend space-time and introduce new additional coordinates and suggest a physical interpretation of this fact. We will then review recent applications of current algebras to E11, applications of related Kac-Moody algebras to four-dimensional gravity, and open questions in the field.