Symmetry and gravitation

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.