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M5-brane in the superspace approach

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Abstract:Motivated by Sen's spacetime prescription for the construction of theories with self-dual field strengths, we present a rigid superspace Lagrangian describing noninteracting tensor multiplets living on a stack of M5-branes and containing all the physical constraints on the fields, yielding the on-shell matching of the degrees of freedom. The geometric superspace approach adopted here offers a natural realization of superdiffeomorphisms and is particularly well suited for the coupling to supergravity. However, within this formulation the (anti-)self-duality property of the 3-form field strengths is lost when the superspace Lagrangian is trivially restricted to spacetime. We propose two main paths to address this issue: a first-order superspace extension of Sen's spacetime results, which, once trivially restricted to spacetime, yields all the dynamical equations including the (anti-)self-duality constraint on the 3-form field strengths, and a possible way to obtain a full superspace description of the theory, based on integral forms.

Submission history

From: Lucrezia Ravera [view email]
[v1] Mon, 13 Jun 2022 18:00:05 UTC (36 KB)
[v2] Wed, 29 Jun 2022 10:09:56 UTC (36 KB)
[v3] Fri, 22 Jul 2022 09:29:08 UTC (37 KB)