English

Towards 2+4 formulation of M5-brane

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-01-27 v1

Abstract

We present an attempt to formulate an action for the worldvolume theory of a single M5-brane, based on the splitting of the six worldvolume directions into 2+4, which breaks manifest Lorentz invariance from SO(1,5)SO(1,5) to SO(1,1)×SO(4)SO(1,1)\times SO(4). To this end, an action for the free six--dimensional (2,0) chiral tensor multiplet, and separately, a nonlinearly interacting chiral 2-form action are constructed. By studying the Lagrangian formulation for the chiral 2-form with 2+4 splitting, it is suggested that, if exists, the modified diffeomorphism of the theory on curved six--dimensional space--time is less trivial than its 1+5 and 3+3 counterpart, thus hindering the coupling of the chiral 2-form to the induced metric on the worldvolume of the M5-brane. We discuss difficulties of further generalisation of the theory. Finally, in terms of Hamiltonian analysis, we show that the naively gauge-fixed failed-PST-covariantised Lagrangian has the correct number of degrees of freedom, and satisfies the hyper--surface deformation algebra.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1511.05395,
  title  = {Towards 2+4 formulation of M5-brane},
  author = {Sheng-Lan Ko and Pichet Vanichchapongjaroen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.05395},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

27 pages, no figure

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:47:25.477Z