The Spacetime Superalgebras in a Massive IIA Background via Brane Probes

TL;DR

This paper explicitly derives spacetime superalgebras from brane probe actions in a massive IIA background, showing their form is unaffected by mass terms and revealing supersymmetric intersection configurations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that superalgebras in massive IIA backgrounds are identical to those in massless cases, indicating background independence from the superalgebra perspective.

Findings

Superalgebras are unchanged by the mass terms in the background.

All D-brane solutions, including D-8-branes, are on equal footing regarding superalgebras.

Identifies supersymmetric intersections as gauge fixings of probe branes.

Abstract

We derive the spacetime superalgebras explicitly from ``test'' p-brane actions in a D-8-brane (i.e. a massive IIA) background to the lowest order in $\theta$ via canonical formalism, and show that the forms of the superalgebras are the same as those in all the other D-brane (i.e. massless IIA) backgrounds, that is, they are indifferent to the presence of the Chern-Simons terms which are proportional to the mass and added to the D-brane actions in the case of massive IIA backgrounds. Thus, we can say that all the D-brane background solutions including a D-8-brane are on equal footing from the viewpoint of the superalgebras via brane probes. We also deduce from the algebra all the previously known 1/4 supersymmetric intersections of a p-brane or a fundamental string with a D-8-brane, as the supersymmetric ``gauge fixings'' of the test branes in the D-8-brane background.