Multiple Membranes from Gauged Supergravity

TL;DR

This paper develops a general framework for constructing multiple membrane actions from gauged supergravity, unifying recent results and exploring various gaugings and deformations for M2 and D2-branes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to derive multiple membrane actions from gauged supergravity using the embedding tensor, encompassing recent models and their generalizations.

Findings

Framework reproduces known multiple membrane actions

Includes conformal and non-conformal gaugings for M2 and D2-branes

Explores massive deformations of membrane systems

Abstract

Starting from gauged N=8 supergravity in three dimensions we construct actions for multiple membranes by taking the limit to global supersymmetry for different choices of the embedding tensor. This provides a general framework that reproduces many recent results on multiple membrane actions as well as generalisations thereof. As examples we discuss conformal (non-conformal) gaugings leading to multiple M2-branes (D2-branes) and massive deformations of these systems.