The rheonomic approach to supergravity

This is the website for the reading group on the rheonomic approach to supergravity, organised by Andrew Beckett within the Edinburgh Mathematical Physics Group.

The D'Auria-Fré formulation of supergravity, also known as the rheonomic or geometric formulation, is an approach which attempts to cast supergravity in a more “geometric” formalism. In this reading group, we will follow the work of D'Auria, Fré, and Castellani and try to understand this approach.

In Semester 1 of 2020-21, we meet on Zoom every Thursday at 12:00-13:30. Click here for the Zoom call. Participants will be emailed the password. You can see the notes from each of the meetings by clicking the titles below. Guillaume has been typing up his notes from the reading group in LaTeX and is making them available on GitHub.

Meeting schedule

  1. Thursday, 29 October 2020, 12:00-13:30
    Zoom
    Klein and Cartan geometry
    Andrew Beckett
    The basics of Klein and Cartan geometry, reductive and symmetric Cartan geometries, the spacetime models.
    Whiteboard notes
  2. Thursday, 5 November 2020, 12:00-13:30
    Zoom
    MacDowell-Mansouri gravity
    Andrew Beckett
    The fake tangent bundle, inducing a metric on the Cartan geometry, more on the spacetime models, the MacDowell-Mansouri action.
    Whiteboard notes
    More detailed (very) rough notes
    Addendum on induced tensor fields
  3. Thursday, 12 November 2020, 12:00-13:30
    Zoom
    D'Auria's review part 1
    Andrea Santi
    Start of D'Auria's review, soft group manifolds, Poincaré gauge transformations, horizontality from the action principle.
    Andrea's notes
  4. Thursday, 19 November 2020, 12:00-13:30
    Zoom
    D'Auria's review part 2
    Andrea Santi
    Continuing D'Auria's review, rheonomic approach to minimal D=4 supergravity.

    Andrea's notes
    Recording of meeting
  5. Thursday, 26 November 2020, 12:00-13:00
    Zoom
    Castellani's review part 1
    José Figueroa-O'Farrill
  6. Thursday, 3 December 2020, 12:00-13:30
    Zoom
    Topic TBD
    Speaker TBD
  7. Thursday, 10 December 2020, 12:00-13:00
    Zoom
    Topic TBD
    Speaker TBD
  8. Thursday, 17 December 2020, 12:00-13:30
    Zoom
    Topic TBD
    Speaker TBD

References

a.d.k.beckett at ed.ac.uk