The eleven dimensional supergravity equations on edge manifolds

Abstract

We study the eleven dimensional supergravity equations which describe a low energy approximation to string theories and are related to M-theory under the AdS/CFT correspondence. These equations take the form of a non-linear differential system, on $\mathbb{B}^7\times\mathbb{S}^4$ with the characteristic degeneracy at the boundary of an edge system, associated to the fibration with fiber $\mathbb{S}^4.$ We compute the indicial roots of the linearized system from the Hodge decomposition of the 4-sphere following the work of Kantor, then using the edge calculus and scattering theory we prove that the moduli space of solutions, near the Freund--Rubin states, is parametrized by three pairs of data on the bounding 6-sphere.