The Eleven-Dimensional Five-Brane

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the eleven-dimensional five-brane action in curved backgrounds, demonstrating its reduction to the D4-brane action and exploring higher-order curvature terms to understand its structure.

Contribution

It derives the five-brane action to second order in curvature and shows its reduction to the D4-brane action, extending understanding of brane dynamics.

Findings

The five-brane action reduces to the D4-brane action upon double dimensional reduction.

Higher-order curvature terms are identified and discussed in the brane action.

The structure of the action including curvature corrections is clarified.

Abstract

We consider the action, in arbitrary curved background, of the eleven-dimensional five-brane to second order in the curvature of the worldvolume tensor field. We show that this action gives upon double dimensional reduction the action of the Dirichlet four-brane up to the same order. We use this result as a starting point to discuss the structure of the action including terms of higher order in the worldvolume curvature.