Reductions of Exceptional Field Theories

David S. Berman, Ray Otsuki

Published 2019-11-14Version 1

Double Field Theory (DFT) and Exceptional Field Theory (EFT), collectively called ExFTs, have proven to be a remarkably powerful new framework for string and M-theory. Exceptional field theories were constructed on a case by case basis as often each EFT has its own idiosyncrasies. Intuitively though, an $E_{n-1(n-1)}$ EFT must be contained in an $E_{n(n)}$ ExFT but how this works has been unclear since different EFTs are not related by reductions but by rearranging degrees of freedom. In this paper we propose a generalised Kaluza-Klein ansatz to relate different ExFTs. We then discuss in more detail the different aspects of the relationship between various ExFTs including the coordinates, section condition and (pseudo)-Lagrangian densities. For the $E_{8(8)}$ EFT we describe a generalisation of the Papageorgakis- Mukhi mechanism to relate the d = 3 topological term in the $E_{8(8)}$ EFT to a Yang-Mills action in the $E_{7(7)}$ EFT. id.s.berman@qmul.ac.uk