Lecture notes on Chern-Simons (super-)gravities. Second edition (February 2008)
| dc.creator | Zanelli, Jorge | |
| dc.date | 2005-02-22 | |
| dc.date | 2008-03-21 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-07T09:27:42Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-07T09:27:42Z | |
| dc.description | This is intended as a broad introduction to Chern-Simons gravity and supergravity. The motivation for these theories lies in the desire to have a gauge invariant system --with a fiber bundle formulation-- in more than three dimensions, which could provide a firm ground for constructing a quantum theory of the gravitational field. The starting point is a gravitational action which generalizes the Einstein theory for dimensions D>4 --Lovelock gravity. It is then shown that in odd dimensions there is a particular choice of the arbitrary parameters of the action that makes the theory gauge invariant under the (anti-)de Sitter or the Poincare groups. The resulting lagrangian is a Chern-Simons form for a connection of the corresponding gauge groups and the vielbein and the spin connection are parts of this connection field. These theories also admit a natural supersymmetric extension for all odd D where the local supersymmetry algebra closes off-shell and without a need for auxiliary fields. No analogous construction is available in even dimensions. A cursory discussion of the unexpected dynamical features of these theories and a number of open problems are also presented. | |
| dc.description | Typos corrected and a few referencesadded. LaTeX, 82 pages, no figures | |
| dc.identifier | https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0502193 | |
| dc.identifier | http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0502193 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/157199 | |
| dc.subject | High Energy Physics - Theory | |
| dc.title | Lecture notes on Chern-Simons (super-)gravities. Second edition (February 2008) | |
| dc.type | text |