Critical fields on the M5-brane and noncommutative open strings

TL;DR

This paper explores the behavior of the M5-brane under critical field conditions, revealing connections to noncommutative open strings and Yang-Mills theories through dimensional reduction and dualities.

Contribution

It demonstrates how the critical field limit on the M5-brane reduces to noncommutative open string and Yang-Mills limits, establishing a link between open membranes and noncommutative gauge theories.

Findings

Reduction to noncommutative open string limit on D4-brane

Dimensional reduction to noncommutative Yang-Mills on D3-brane

Identification of the open membrane metric with a finite length scale

Abstract

The M5-brane is investigated near critical field-strength. We show that this limit on the M5-brane reduces to the noncommutative open string limit on the D4-brane. The reduction on a two-torus leads to both the noncommutative open string limit and the noncommutative Yang-Mills limit on the D3-brane. The decoupled noncommutative five-brane is identified with the strong coupling limit of the noncommutative open string theory on the D4-brane and S-duality on the noncommutative D3-brane is identified with a modular transformation on the five-brane. We argue that the open membrane metric defines a finite length scale on the worldvolume of the M5-brane in the decoupling limit. This length scale can be associated to the effective length scale of an open membrane.