On eleven-dimensional supergravity and Chern–Simons theory

Abstract

We probe in some depth into the structure of eleven-dimensional, osp(32|1)-based Chern–Simons supergravity, as put forward by Troncoso and Zanelli (TZ) in 1997. We find that the TZ Lagrangian may be cast as a polynomial in 1/l, where l is a length, and compute explicitly the first three dominant terms. The term proportional to 1/l9 turns out to be essentially the Lagrangian of the standard 1978 supergravity theory of Cremmer, Julia and Scherk, thus establishing a previously unknown relation between the two theories. The computation is nontrivial because, when written in a sufficiently explicit way, the TZ Lagrangian has roughly one thousand non-explicitly Lorentz-covariant terms. Specially designed algebraic techniques are used to accomplish the results.