E10,BE10and Arithmetical Chaos in Superstring Cosmology

It is shown that the neverending oscillatory behavior of the generic solution, near a cosmological singularity, of the massless bosonic sector of superstring theory can be described as a billiard motion within a simplex in nine-dimensional hyperbolic space. The Coxeter group of reflections of this billiard is discrete and is the Weyl group of the hyperbolic Kac-Moody algebra ${\mathrm{E}}_{10}$ (for type II) or ${\mathrm{BE}}_{10}$ (for type I or heterotic), which are both arithmetic. These results lead to a proof of the chaotic (“Anosov”) nature of the classical cosmological oscillations, and suggest a “chaotic quantum billiard” scenario of vacuum selection in string theory.