Table of Contents

Acknowledgement.- Preface.- 1.- Introduction.- 2. Extended Space-Times, Causal Structure and Penrose Diagrams.- 3. Rotating Black-Holes and Thermodynamics.- 4. Cosmology: a Historical Outline from Kant to WMAP and Planck.- 5. Cosmology and General Relativity: Mathematical Description of the Universe.- 6. Supergravity: the Principles.- 7. The Branes: Three Viewpoints.- 8. Supergravity: a Bestiary in Diverse Dimensions.- 9. Supergravity: an Anthology of Solutions.- 10. Conclusion of Volume Two.- Appendix A. Spinors and gamma matrix algebra.- Appendix B. Auxiliary tools for p-brane actions.- Apprndix C. Auxiliary information about some superalgebras.- Appendix D. Mathematica Package NOVAMANIFOLDA.- Appendix E. Examples of the use of the package NOVAMANIFOLDA.- Index.

About the Author

Pietro Frè is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Torino, Italy and is currently serving as Scientific Counsellor of the Italian Embassy in Moscow. His scientific passion lies in supergravity and all allied topics, since the inception of the field, in 1976. He was professor at SISSA, worked in the USA and at CERN. He has taught General Relativity for 15 years. He has previously published two scientific monographs, “Supergravity and Superstrings” and “The N=2 Wonderland”. He is also the author of a popular science book on cosmology (“Il fascino oscuro dell’inflazione”, Springer 2009), and two novels, in Italian.