Particles and Strings in spaces with degenerate metrics

Author(s)

Luís Antonio Cabral

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Física (IF/SBI)
• Defense date: 1999-08-27

Examining board members

Victor de Oliveira Rivelles; João Barcelos Neto; Nathan Jacob Berkovits; Marcelo Otavio Caminha Gomes; Adilson Jose da Silva

• Advisor: Victor de Oliveira Rivelles

Abstract

In this work we stud the dynamics of particles and strings in a gravitational Field with degenerate metric. We use the Hamiltonian formalism to find out the constraints and the effective dynamics of the system. We classify the constraint structure according to the formo the me-tric and the space(time) dimension. We also obtain the representation of the symmetries in terms of the isometries generated by the null eigenvectors of the metric. (AU)