NS5-branes in IIA supergravity and gravitational anomalies

Abstract

We construct a gravitational-anomaly-free effective action for the coupled system of IIA D=10 dynamical supergravity interacting with an NS5-brane. The NS5-brane is considered as elementary in that the associated current is a delta-function supported on its worldvolume. Our approach is based on a Chern-kernel which encodes the singularities of the three-form field strength near the brane in an SO(4)-invariant way and provides a solution for its Bianchi identity in terms of a two-form potential. A dimensional reduction of the recently constructed anomaly-free effective action for an elementary M5-brane in D=11 is seen to reproduce our ten-dimensional action. The Chern-kernel approach provides in particular a concrete realization of the anomaly cancellation mechanism envisaged by Witten.

LaTex, 31 pages, no figures

References in corpus (1)

• Anomaly free effective action for the elementary M5-brane

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Various Faces of Type IIA Supergravity
• D=4 supergravity dynamically coupled to a massless superparticle in a superfield Lagrangian approach
• Chern-kernels and anomaly cancellation in M-theory
• Intersecting M2- and M5-branes
• Topological aspects of the NS5-brane
• Dirac branes for Dirichlet branes: Supergravity actions
• Intersecting D-branes, Chern-kernels and the inflow mechanism