Ghost-free superconformal action for multiple M2-branes

By Miguel Ángel Gracia Bandrés, A. Lipstein, J. Schwarz. 2008

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Bagger-Lambert construction of Script N = 8 superconformal field theories (SCFT) in three dimensions is based on 3-algebras. Three groups of researchers recently realized that an arbitrary semisimple Lie algebra can be incorporated by using a suitable Lorentzian signature 3-algebra. The SU(N) case is a candidate for the SCFT describing coincident M2-branes. However, these theories contain ghost degrees of freedom, which is unsatisfactory. We modify them by gauging certain global symmetries. This eliminates the ghosts from these theories while preserving all of their desirable properties. The resulting theories turn out to be precisely equivalent to Script N = 8 super Yang-Mills theories.

Subfields: Geometry and Topology, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f46f26fc18daf16ca5a5ccd26aa7a370fc83b64a

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Citations in the corpus

n-ary algebras: a review with applications (2010, background): “It is possible to remove the ghosts of the 3-Lie Lorentzian theories, but the modification breaks the conformal invariance spontaneously and reduces them to maximally supersymmetric d = 3 YM theories [281, 282].”
On type IIA Penrose limit and = 6 Chern-Simons theories (2008, background): “If we allow the non-degenerate metric, we can find N = 8 supersymmetric theories where we can take the number of branes N arbitrary large [22, 23, 24, 34, 35, 38, 41].”
(1,0) superconformal models in six dimensions (2011, background): “In these models, the ghost states have been eliminated at the cost of breaking conformal symmetry by further gauging of particular shift symmetries [48], which are however absent in the models constructed here.”
Generalized conformal symmetry and recovery of SO(8) in multiple M2 and D2 branes (2008, background): “The levels of the Chern-Simons gauge fields There are attempts to kill the ghost fields by gauging a shift symmetry [7, 8].”
A Massive Study of M2-brane Proposals (2008, background): “One can, however, change the theory as in [12][13], and then the action we have analyzed is only part of a more complete BRST-invariant action, which includes Fadeev-Popov ghosts.”
N=5,6 Superconformal Chern-Simons Theories and M2-branes on Orbifolds (2008, unknown): “Contents”