Maximal supersymmetry, light-front dynamics and exceptional symmetries

Journal article, 2011

In this talk I describe some recent work by Kim, Ramond and myself where we formulate N = 8 Supergravity in the light-front form. In this form the E 7(7) symmetry, which in the covariant formulation is just a duality symmetry and a non-linear σ-model symmetry in the bosonic fields at the level of the equations of motion, is shown to be a genuine symmetry much like the SuperPoincaré symmetry and it is found that they are spanned on the same multiplet. Hence in this formulation the E 7(7) symmetry transforms all the physical degrees of freedom. Finally I argue that this formalism is well suited to discuss possible counterterms in order to examine the divergence properties of the perturbation expansion, a much discussed issue these days.