Marc Henneaux & Jorge Zanelli 
Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems: The Quest for Beauty and Simplicity 
Claudio Bunster Festschrift

This article is dedicated to Claudio Bunster on the occasion of his 60th birthday. It is a great honor to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to him, who in my opinion has been the greatest national physicist ever, for his wise guidance and intrepid support through the years. As a Chilean, I can further tell that Claudio’s contributions have been well far beyond theoretical physics, helping our country to be ready to face future challenges through science. Gravity in diverse dimensions is a subject in which Claudio has done major c- tributions, encouraging in many ways the following work, that is being made along different fronts in collaboration with my colleagues Diego Correa, Gustavo Dotti, Julio Oliva and David Tempo. Thepursuitforwormholesolutions, whicharehandlesinthespacetimetopology, it is as old as General Relativity and it has appeared in theoretical physics within different subjects, ranging from the attempt of describing physics as pure geometry, as in the Einstein–Rosen bridge model of a particle [1], to the concept of “charge withoutcharge”[2], aswell asindifferentissuesconcerningthe Euclideanapproach to quantum gravity (see, e.g., [3]). More recently, the systematic study of this kind of objects was pushed forward by the works of Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever [4, 5].

Table of Content

OPENING REMARKS.- Recorded in Santa Barbara.- Opening.- CONTRIBUTED PAPERS.- On the Symmetries of Classical String Theory.- Eddington-Born-Infeld Action and the Dark Side of General Relativity.- Maximal Supersymmetric Theories and E7(7) in Light-Cone Superspace.- Strongly Hyperbolic Extensions of the ADM Hamiltonian.- Black Hole Entropy and the Problem of Universality.- Sources for Chern-Simons theories.- The Emergence of Fermions and The E Content.- Why did the Universe Inflate?.- Kac-Moody algebras and the structure of cosmological singularities: a new light on the Belinskii-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz analysis.- Black holes with a conformally coupled scalar field.- Quantum Mechanics on some Supermanifolds.- John Wheeler’s Quest for Beauty and Simplicity.- Magnetic Monopoles in Electromagnetism and Gravity.- The Census Taker’s Hat.- Static wormholes in vacuum and gravity in diverse dimensions.- CLOSING.- Claudio Bunster: A personal recollection.- Profile of Claudio Bunster.