Symmetry and gravitation

Abstract

Marc Henneaux is a Belgian physicist who spent part of his career in the USA, working with Claudio Bunster (Teitelboim Weitzman) at Princeton University (1978-1979), then in Austin (1981-1984), in John Wheeler's group. He then became a researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium), before joining the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1993, where he was appointed professor. In 1996, he founded the Theoretical and Mathematical Physics group, which he headed until 2012. Since 2004, he has been Director of the Solvay International Institutes of Physics and Chemistry, which have organized the famous Solvay Physics and Chemistry Councils since 1911.

Marc Henneaux works on fundamental forces, their symmetries and, in particular, gravity. His areas of research are gauge theories, Einstein's theory, string theory and its generalization, M-theory. He is interested in the solutions of Einstein's equations in anti-Sitter space (i.e. with a negative cosmological constant Λ). He is one of the most recognized specialists in the field, and has contributed to major discoveries with a strong impact in the physics community and beyond, which have given rise to numerous developments in the literature.

An important part of his work has exploited 3-dimensional spacetimes (2 space+1 time), which are exceptional laboratories for testing concepts of gravity, while being simpler than higher-dimensional spaces, and yet rich enough to possess black holes, with all their thermodynamics, to include high-spin fields, a field in full development today, and finally to enable the study of holographic AdS/CFT (anti Sitter / Conformal Field Theory) correspondence.

As early as the 1980s, Marc Henneaux intuited this richness, and with J. David Brown, then a PhD student at the University of Texas, he was responsible for an important breakthrough: the discovery that gravity in 3-dimensional spacetime with negative cosmological constant possessed asymptotic symmetries forming an infinite-dimensional algebra and isomorphic to the conformal algebra of 2-dimensional flat space with non-zero central charge. They gave the value of this central charge, since called the "Brown-Henneaux central charge". This work is considered one of the precursors of the famous AdS/CFT, or holographic, correspondence discovered by Juan Maldacena in 1997.

He also made major contributions to high-spin gauge field theory.