Aspects of gravitation in the light-cone gauge

Abstract

In this thesis, we investigate gravitation in light-cone gauge. There are various motivations to study pure gravity, in four dimensions, as a field theory in light-cone gauge. These include recent results pertaining to scattering amplitudes, KLT relations and MHV Lagrangians. Further, recent analysis of the finiteness properties of N = 8 supergravity strongly suggests that we must revisit pure gravity as a field theory. Although some work has gone into understanding light-cone gravity in flat spacetime, there are no findings as far as light-cone gravity on curved backgrounds is concerned. This is one of the gaps, in the literature, that the present thesis aims to address. Additionally, this thesis investigates some of the mathematical structures of the light-cone Hamiltonians describing gravity theories (both without and with supersymmetry). We find unique "quadratic form" structures in these Hamiltonians and comment on the possible significance of these structures.