On the algebraic structure of Killing superalgebras

We study the algebraic structure of the Killing superalgebra of a supersymmetric background of 11-dimensional supergravity and show that it is isomorphic to a filtered deformation of a Z-graded subalgebra of the Poincaré superalgebra. We are able to map the classification problem for highly supersymmetric backgrounds (i.e., those which preserve more than half the supersymmetry) to the classification problem of a certain class of filtered deformations of graded subalgebras of the Poincaré superalgebra. We show that one can reconstruct a highly supersymmetric background from its Killing superalgebra; in so doing, we relate the bosonic field equations of 11-dimensional supergravity to the Jacobi identity of the Killing superalgebra and show in this way that preserving more than half the supersymmetry implies the bosonic field equations.