The supermembrane revisited

TL;DR

This paper revisits the supermembrane, deriving its dynamics and supergravity constraints through superembedding, and explores its relation to D2-branes, including gauged and massive variants, within supergravity backgrounds.

Contribution

It provides a detailed derivation of supermembrane dynamics and supergravity constraints from superembedding, connecting gauged supermembranes to D2-branes and extending to massive cases.

Findings

Derived D2-brane action from gauged supermembrane.

Established the superembedding approach for supermembrane dynamics.

Extended analysis to massive D2-branes in supergravity backgrounds.

Abstract

The M2-brane is studied from the perspective of superembeddings. We review the derivation of the M2-brane dynamics and the supergravity constraints from the standard superembedding constraint and we discuss explicitly the induced d=3, N=8 superconformal geometry on the worldvolume. We show that the gauged supermembrane, for a target space with a U(1) isometry, is the standard D2-brane in a type IIA supergravity background. In particular, the D2-brane action, complete with the Dirac-Born-Infeld term, arises from the gauged Wess-Zumino worldvolume 4-form via the brane action principle. The discussion is extended to the massive D2-brane considered as a gauged supermembrane in a massive D=11 superspace background. Type IIA supergeometry is derived using Kaluza-Klein techniques in superspace.