On a historical note, we first describe the early superspace construction of counterterms in supergravity and then move on to a brief discussion of selected areas in string theory where higher order supergravity invariants enter the effective theories. Motivated by this description we argue that it is important to understand p-brane actions with κ-invariant higher order terms, thus re-opening t...

I review the calculation of the glueball spectrum in non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory (in 3 and 4 dimensions) using the conjectured duality between supergravity and large N gauge theories. The glueball masses are obtained by solving the supergravity wave equations in a black hole geometry. The masses obtained this way are in unexpectedly good agreement with the available lattice data, and a...

We present new supersymmetric AdS3 solutions of type IIB supergravity and AdS2 solutions of D = 11 supergravity. The former are dual to conformal field theories in two dimensions with N = (0, 2) supersymmetry while the latter are dual to conformal quantum mechanics with two supercharges. Our construction also includes AdS2 solutions of D = 11 supergravity that have non-compact internal spaces w...

The assumptions behind the recently conjectured relation between gauge theory and supergravity are elaborated on. It is pointed out that the scaling limit that preserves supergravity solutions, gives the entire DBI action on the gauge theory side, but in the low energy limit the relation between the conformal field theory and Anti-de Sitter supergravity emerges. We also argue that recent work o...

The hidden on-shell E7(7) symmetry of maximal supergravity is usually discussed in a truncation from D = 11 to four dimensions. In this article, we reverse the logic and start from a theory with manifest off-shell E7(7) symmetry inspired by West’s coset construction. Following de Wit’s and Nicolai’s idea that a 4 + 56 dimensional “exceptional geometry” underlies maximal supergravity, we constru...

We present new supersymmetric AdS3 solutions of type IIB supergravity and AdS2 solutions of D = 11 supergravity. The former are dual to conformal field theories in two dimensions with N = (0, 2) supersymmetry while the latter are dual to conformal quantum mechanics with two supercharges. Our construction also includes AdS2 solutions of D = 11 supergravity that have non-compact internal spaces w...

We quantise the classical gauge theory of N = 2 w ∞-supergravity and show how the underlying N = 2 super-w ∞ algebra gets deformed into an N = 2 super-W ∞ algebra. Both algebras contain the N = 2 super-Virasoro algebra as a subalgebra. We discuss how one can extract from these results information about quantum N = 2 W N-supergravity theories containing a finite number of higher-spin symmetries ...

All cubic couplings in type IIB supergravity on AdS53S 5 that involve two scalar fields s that are mixtures of the five form field strength on S and the trace of the graviton on S are derived by using the covariant equations of motion and the quadratic action for type IIB supergravity on AdS53S . All corresponding three-point functions in SYM4 are calculated in the supergravity approximation. I...

We show that the bosonic equations of motion of eleven-dimensional supergravity (with gravitino set to zero) are equivalent to the vanishing of an equation written purely in terms of the supercovariant derivative appearing in the supersymmetry transformation of the gravitino. This equation corresponds to the vanishing of the gamma trace of the curvature of this superconnection. The equivalence ...

We present here a detailed analysis of the local symmetries of supergravity in an arbitrary dimension D, both in the component and superfield approaches, using a field–space democracy point of view. As an application, we discuss briefly how a complete description of the local gauge symmetries clarifies the properties of the supergravity– superbrane coupled system in the standard background supe...