(Super)-Gravities Beyond 4 Dimensions

Abstract

These lectures are 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 action -in the sense of fiber bundles- in more than three dimensions, which could provide a firm ground for constructing a quantum theory of the gravitational field. The case of Chern-Simons gravity and its supersymmetric extension for all odd D is presented. No analogous construction is available in even dimensions.

54 pages, 5 figures. Lectures given at the 2001 Summer School "Geometric and Topological Methods for Quantum Field Theory", Villa de Leyva, Colombia, June 2001. Several typos and editorial mistakes corrected, references added

References in corpus (4)

• Topological Invariants, Instantons and Chiral Anomaly on Spaces with Torsion
• Black holes with topologically nontrivial AdS asymptotics
• M-Theory as a Holographic Field Theory
• Quantization of the Gravitational Constant in Odd-Dimensional Gravity

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Nonlinear higher spin theories in various dimensions
• Brane cosmology with curvature corrections
• Gauss-Bonnet gravity renders negative tension braneworlds unstable
• Higher-spin Chern-Simons theories in odd dimensions
• On the Algebraic Structure of Higher-Spin Field Equations and New Exact Solutions
• (Super-)Gravities of a different sort
• Intersecting hypersurfaces and Lovelock Gravity