Speaker
Description
From a quantum gravity point of view, higher-derivative corrections serve as means of probing String Theory at a fundamental level. Even though the complete expansion involves all fields of the theory, most of the attention has been concentrated on the gravitational action. The gravitational part of the first higher derivative corrections to M-theory, which begins at eight derivatives, has been recently reinterpreted in the framework of generalised geometry based on an M-theoretic Lichnerowicz formula. It suggests to modify the supersymmetry transformations to incorporate the gravitational Chern-Simons term needed for the consistency of the theory. Recent progress in the classification of string backgrounds using Generalised Complex Geometry raises hopes that this formalism together with duality covariance, which provides rather powerful constraints on the structure of the quantum corrections in the effective actions, should allow to recover the higher-derivative corrections in their entirety. We derive (IIA/HET duality manifest) generalised Bismut-Lichnerowicz formulae that describes 6d N=(1,1) supergravities beyond two derivative-level.
