M5-brane in the superspace approach

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.

V3, 33 pages, title changed, misprints corrected

References in corpus (7)

• On p-form gauge theories and their conformal limits
• Supergravity Actions with Integral Forms
• Self-interacting chiral p-forms in higher dimensions
• Polynomial Duality-Symmetric Lagrangians for Free p-Forms
• Geometrical Aspects of An Abelian (2,0) Action
• The Integral Form of Supergravity
• Chern-Simons Theory on Supermanifolds

Cited by in corpus (1)

• On-Shell Action for Type IIB Supergravity and Superstrings on $Ad{S}_5\times S^5$