ABSTRACT
A formal "small tension" expansion of D=11 supergravity near a spacelike singularity is shown to be equivalent, at least up to 30th order in height, to a null geodesic motion in the infinite-dimensional coset space E(10)/K(E10), where K(E10) is the maximal compact subgroup of the hyperbolic Kac-Moody group E10(R). For the proof we make use of a novel decomposition of E10 into irreducible representations of its SL(10,R) subgroup. We explicitly show how to identify the first four rungs of the E10 coset fields with the values of geometric quantities constructed from D=11 supergravity fields and their spatial gradients taken at some comoving spatial point.
ABSTRACT
It is shown that the neverending oscillatory behavior of the generic solution, near a cosmological singularity, of the massless bosonic sector of superstring theory can be described as a billiard motion within a simplex in nine-dimensional hyperbolic space. The Coxeter group of reflections of this billiard is discrete and is the Weyl group of the hyperbolic Kac-Moody algebra E10 (for type II) or BE10 (for type I or heterotic), which are both arithmetic. These results lead to a proof of the chaotic ("Anosov") nature of the classical cosmological oscillations, and suggest a "chaotic quantum billiard" scenario of vacuum selection in string theory.
ABSTRACT
It is shown that the general solution near a spacelike singularity of the Einstein-dilaton- p-form field equations relevant to superstring theories and M theory exhibits an oscillatory behavior of the Belinskii-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz type. String dualities play a significant role in the analysis.
