Marc Henneaux

Marc, Baron Henneaux is a Belgian theoretical physicist and professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) who was born in Brussels on 5 March 1955.

From there, he held a research position at the Belgian Science foundation (FNRS) until 1992, after which he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Brussels (1993-1996).

The research of Henneaux is devoted to the study of the theoretical models describing the fundamental physical interactions (electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity), with a particular emphasis on their symmetries.

With J. David Brown, he showed that Einstein's theory of gravity in three spacetime dimensions with a negative cosmological constant possesses a remarkable symmetry structure at infinity described by two Virasoro algebras.

More recently, in collaboration with Thibault Damour, he showed that hyperbolic Coxeter groups appear somewhat unexpectedly in gravitational theories and their supersymmetric extensions, in the BKL behaviour of the fields near a spacelike singularity.