World-Volume Action of the M Theory Five-Brane

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive 6d world-volume action for the M theory five-brane, incorporating key symmetries and presenting both a non-manifest and a manifest coordinate invariance formulation.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed world-volume action for the M theory five-brane with full symmetry properties, including an alternative formulation with manifest invariance.

Findings

The action exhibits 11d super-Poincare invariance.

The formulation includes kappa symmetry and general coordinate invariance.

An alternative approach with auxiliary fields achieves manifest invariance.

Abstract

This paper presents a 6d world-volume action that describes the dynamics of the M theory five-brane in a flat 11d space-time background. The world-volume action has global 11d super-Poincare invariance, as well as 6d general coordinate invariance and kappa symmetry, which are realized as local symmetries. The paper mostly considers a formulation in which general coordinate invariance is not manifest in one direction. However, it also describes briefly an alternative formulation, due to Pasti, Sorokin, and Tonin, in which general coordinate invariance is manifest. The latter approach requires auxiliary fields and new gauge invariances.