Giant gravitons as probes of gauged supergravity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how giant graviton probes in 11-dimensional supergravity can be explicitly constructed using lift ansatze from lower-dimensional gauged supergravities, simplifying the analysis of brane dynamics.

Contribution

It provides explicit solutions for embedding and motion of M-branes in lifted supergravity backgrounds, linking brane probes to massive charged particles in gauged supergravity.

Findings

Explicit brane embedding solutions derived from lift ansatze.

Probing superstar geometries with these particles supports the giant graviton conjecture.

Reduction of brane probe actions to particle actions in gauged supergravity.

Abstract

We consider giant graviton probes of 11-dimensional supergravity solutions which are lifts of arbitrary solutions of 4-dimensional U(1)^4 and 7-dimensional U(1)^2 gauged supergravities. We show that the structure of the lift ansatze is sufficient to explicitly find a solution for the embedding and motion of the M5- or M2-brane in the internal space. The brane probe action then reduces to that of a massive charged particle in the gauged supergravity, demonstrating that probing the gauged supergravity with such particles is equivalent to the more involved 11-dimensional brane probe calculation. As an application of this we use these particles to probe superstar geometries which are conjectured to be sourced by giant gravitons.