Advances in geometry and Lie algebras from supergravity (Q1706228)

This monography -- like the author's accompanying book [A conceptual history of symmetry from Plato to the superworld. Berlin: Springer (2018; Zbl 1410.01002)] -- is a representative of the old interplay between geometry and physics and exhibits some recent advances in special geometries and Lie theory on the mathematical side and supergravity theories on the physical side. Roughly speaking the geometro-physical interaction examined in the book is as follows. There is a well-known discrepancy between the empirical dimension of space-time (which is four with high experimental accuracy) and its possible dimensions in consistent supersymmetric quantum field theories (which are typically more than four). This discrepancy is resolved by performing a ``dimensional reduction'' in the theory i.e. ``warping up'' the extra dimensions into so-called internal spaces which are supposed to be small enough to stay out of current experimental access. The demand of an appropriate amount of supersymmetry to survive dimensional reduction produces a set of constraints on the internal geometry and a great discovery of the 1970--80's was that the classification of possible internal geometries goes along the lines of M. Berger's famous 1952 classification of possible holonomies of irreducible Riemannian manifolds. The book contains nine chapters. Chapter 1 is a rapid introduction into the theory of finite groups and Lie algebras and related topics containing a particularly interesting detailed description of the structure and representation theory of the second smallest simple group \(\mathrm{ PSL}(2,{\mathbb Z}_7)\); Chapters 2--3 are an invitation to classical Cartan-Killing theory of symmetric spaces as well as to Riemannian manifolds with special holonomy such as the Kähler, hyper-Kähler and quaternionic Kähler manifolds; Chapter 4 deals with a novel issue namely the definition of the so-called \textit{special Kähler manifolds} (not to be mixed with Calabi-Yau spaces!) -- it is worth noting that meanwhile the Kähler, hyper-Kähler and quaternionic Kähler manifolds were known to mathematicians from Berger's list since the 1950's, special Kähler manifolds came to existence only in the 1980--90's and were discovered by physicists working on supergravity --; Chapter 5 is devoted to the Tits--Satake projection in Lie algebra theory; the remaining chapters contain recent physical applications of the previously collected material, namely classification of four dimensional \(N=2\) supersymmetric black hole solutions via enumeration of nilpotent orbits on homogeneous spaces (Chapter 6); the construction of \(\mathrm E_7\) and \(\mathrm F_4\) supergravity scalar potentials and gauging of supergavity theories (Chapter 7); and finally the famous hyper-Kähler quotient construction of Hitchin-Karlhede-Lindström-Roček and its various applications from constructing ALE-spaces to resolutions of \({\mathbb C}^n/\Gamma\) singularities like the \({\mathbb C}^3/\mathrm{PSL}(2,{\mathbb Z}_7)\) singularity (Chapter 8); the last Chapter 9 is an outlook and summary with an emphasis on the interaction between various deep concepts of modern differential and algebraic geometry and supersymmetric field theories as well as contains philosophical reflections about the similarity of aims and possible common roots of these two apparently different (mathematical and physical) disciplines of natural sciences. Each chapter contains a historical introduction-summary which helps the reader to locate the material within the quite complex current stage of modern geometry and theoretical physics as well as contains lot of explicitly worked-out examples with a collection of practical computational rules. Finally about the style of the book. Although the author's definite aim with his two-volume monograph is to set up a ``communication channel'' between the mathematician and physicist community by transmitting, exchanging ideas and inviting for further two-sided discussions, in the reviewer's opinion the book cannot fully achieve this goal because of a slight detachment of presentation from content. The book has surely been written in the language and style (i.e., accuracy and notational conventions) of the physicists (and not of the mathematicians) and this language and style has traditionally been designed to display physical (rather than mathematical) ideas; however in spite of the book's physical character the reader, parallel with the mathematical introductions summarized above, should not expect an introduction to physical ideas (like supersymmetry, how to construct supersymmetric field theories, etc.). As the author writes on p. 73: ``In this book we neither discuss the construction of supergravity theories, nor we derive the constraints imposed by supersymmetry on geometry. Our commitment is simply to present the vast wealth of geometrical lore that supegravity Occam's razor has introduced, or systematically reorganized, in the field of mathematics.''