Fermionic Kac-Moody Billiards and Supergravity

Abstract

We study the "fermionic billiards", i.e. the chaotic dynamics of the gravitino, that arise in the near-spacelike-singularity limit of eleven-dimensional supergravity and of its dimensional truncations (notably four-dimensional simple supergravity). By exploiting the gravity-coset correspondence, we show that the billiard dynamics of the gravitino is described by a `spin extension' of the E(10) Weyl group, namely as a product of 90 degree `vector-spinor rotations' along certain simple-root-related generators of the maximal compact subalgebra K(E(10)) of the hyperbolic Kac--Moody algebra E(10). The `super-billiard' that combines the bosonic and fermionic billiards is found to have a remarkably simple structure, which exhibits a striking analogy with a polarized photon propagating in the ten-dimensional Lorentzian Weyl chamber of E(10).