Coset symmetries in dimensionally reduced bosonic string theory

Abstract

We discuss the dimensional reduction of various effective actions, particularly that of the closed bosonic string and pure gravity, to two and three dimensions. The result for the closed bosonic string leads to coset symmetries which are in agreement with those recently predicted and argued to be present in a new unreduced formulation of this theory. We also show that part of the Geroch group appears in the unreduced duality symmetric formulation of gravity recently proposed. We conjecture that this formulation can be extended to a non-linear realisation based on a Kac–Moody algebra which we identify. We also briefly discuss the proposed action of bosonic M-theory.