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Phys. Rev. D 80, 061701(R) (2009) [5 pages]

Supersymmetric quantum cosmological billiards

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Axel Kleinschmidt
Physique Théorique et Mathématique and International Solvay Institutes, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Boulevard du Triomphe, ULB-CP231, BE-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium

Michael Koehn and Hermann Nicolai
Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut, Am Mühlenberg 1, DE-14476 Golm, Germany

Received 20 July 2009; published 22 September 2009

D=11 supergravity near a spacelike singularity admits a cosmological billiard description based on the hyperbolic Kac-Moody group E10. The quantization of this system via the supersymmetry constraint is shown to lead to wave functions involving automorphic (Maass wave) forms under the modular group W+(E10)≅PSL2(O) with Dirichlet boundary conditions on the billiard domain. A general inequality for the Laplace eigenvalues of these automorphic forms implies that the wave function of the Universe is generically complex and always tends to zero when approaching the initial singularity. We discuss possible implications of this result for the question of singularity resolution in quantum cosmology and comment on the differences with other approaches.

© 2009 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.80.061701
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.80.061701
PACS:
04.65.+e, 04.60.Kz, 11.30.Pb, 98.80.Qc