A Massive Study of M2-brane Proposals

By Joaquim Gomis, Diego Rodríguez-Gómez, Mark Van Raamsdonk, H. Verlinde. 2008

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We test the proposals for the worldvolume theory of M2-branes by studying its maximally supersymmetric mass-deformation. We check the simplest prediction for the mass-deformed theory on N M2-branes: that there should be a set of discrete vacua in one-to-one correspondence with partitions on N. For the mass-deformed Lorentzian three-algebra theory, we find only a single classical vacuum, casting doubt on its M2-brane interpretation. For the mass-deformed ABJM theory, we do find a discrete set of solutions, but these are more numerous than predicted. We discuss possible resolutions of this puzzling discrepancy. We argue that the classical vacuum solutions of the mass-deformed ABJM theory display properties of fuzzy three-spheres, as expected from their gravitational dual interpretation.

Subfields: Mathematical Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8abc7978be3f30182194cfe83028adc463da14fc

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Citations in the corpus

Orbifolds of M-strings (2013, background): “22): The ground states of the theory of k M2 branes on flat transverse space on T 2 taking the size of T 2 to be much smaller than the length between the M5-branes (when the scalars are massed up) are labeled by a single Young diagram of size k [24–27].”
Deformations of superconformal theories (2016, background): “Some early and recent discussions of universal mass deformations in N = 8 theories and their gravity duals are in [51–56].”
Generalized conformal symmetry and recovery of SO(8) in multiple M2 and D2 branes (2008, methodology): “There are also interesting works of the ABJM theory for the relation to a M5-brane through the Basu-Harvey equations [20, 21, 22], N = 6 Chern-Simons theory with the other gauge groups [23, 24] and the N ≤ 8 superconformal theories from the 3-dimensional gauged supergravity models [25].”
Fractional M2-branes (2008, background): “For instance, our claim (based on [11]) that the U(M)k N = 3 supersymmetric pure Chern-Simons theories with M > k do not exist implies that almost all of the classical supersymmetric vacua of the mass-deformed U(N) × U(N) theory found in [12] do not survive in the quantum theory (when k = 1), so mor”