Motivated by various holographic applications of string theory, including the dual description of condensed matter systems, there has been much recent interest in building consistent truncations of higher-dimensional supergravity down to gauged supergravity in four and five dimensions. I will review recent progress in this direction, focusing on complete classification results for the D=4 N=2 gauged supergravities with AdS vacua that consistently arise from M-theory on a large class of seven-dimensional manifolds. The latter include well-known compactification spaces, and the D=4 theories they give rise to exhibit interesting features like non-abelian gauge groups, vacuum supersymmetry breaking and massive scalar and vector Kaluza-Klein modes.

Utrecht University