Quantum supersymmetric cosmology and its hidden Kac--Moody structure

Abstract

We study the quantum dynamics of a supersymmetric squashed three-sphere by dimensionally reducing (to one timelike dimension) the action of D = 4 simple supergravity for an SO(3)-homogeneous (Bianchi IX) cosmological model. The quantization of the homogeneous gravitino field leads to a 64-dimensional fermionic Hilbert space. The algebra of the supersymmetry constraints and of the Hamiltonian one is found to close. One finds that the quantum Hamiltonian is built from operators that generate a 64-dimensional representation of the (infinite-dimensional) maximally compact sub-algebra of the rank-3 hyperbolic Kac–Moody algebra AE3. Some exponentials of these operators generate a spinorial extension of the Weyl group of AE3 which describe (in the small wavelength limit) the chaotic quantum evolution of the universe near the cosmological singularity.