Gravitation and quadratic forms

Abstract

The light-cone Hamiltonians describing both pure ( N = 0) Yang-Mills and N = 4 super Yang-Mills may be expressed as quadratic forms. Here, we show that this feature extends to theories of gravity. We demonstrate how the Hamiltonians of both pure gravity and N = 8 supergravity, in four dimensions, may be written as quadratic forms. We examine the effect of residual reparametrizations on the Hamiltonian and the resulting quadratic form