Coupling M2-branes to background fields

TL;DR

This paper explores extending the ABJM action to include background field couplings, focusing on quadratic terms and ensuring consistency with D2-brane reductions via the Higgs mechanism.

Contribution

It introduces quadratic background field couplings to the ABJM action, aligning them with Myers-Chern-Simons terms through Higgs mechanism reduction.

Findings

Quadratic background couplings are fixed by consistency with D2-brane limits.

Extended ABJM action includes Myers-type terms for background fields.

Ensures proper reduction to D2-brane action via Higgs mechanism.

Abstract

We discuss some of the issues arising in trying to extend the ABJM action to include couplings to background fields. This is analogous to the Myers-Chern-Simons terms of the multiple Dp-brane action. We review and extend previous results to include terms which are quadratic in the background fields. These are fixed by requiring that we recover the correct Myers-type terms upon using the novel Higgs mechanism to reduce to the multiple D2-brane action.