Supersymmetric supermembrane vacua and singletons Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The eleven-dimensional supermembrane exhibits a local world-volume Siegel symmetry provided the spacetime background is a solution of D=11 supergravity. If this background admits Killing spinors, the supermembrane action also admits rigid spacetime supersymmetries. We show that in a physical gauge, these symmetries give rise to rigid world-volume supersymmetries and we derive criteria for the existence of surviving supersymmetries of membrane vacua. We then obtain new supermembrane solutions in which spacetime is the product of four-dimensional anti-de Sitter space and a compact seven-dimensional internal space M7, and the membrane occupies the boundary of AdS at spatial infinity. Applying our criteria for vacuum supersymmetry, we find that for an M7 with N Killing spinors, the vacuum has N surviving supersymmetries. The physical fluctuations can be interpreted as singletons of OSp(4/N). 1987.

published proceedings

  • Physics Letters B

author list (cited authors)

  • Bergshoeff, E., Duff, M. J., Pope, C. N., & Sezgin, E.

citation count

  • 79

complete list of authors

  • Bergshoeff, E||Duff, MJ||Pope, CN||Sezgin, E

publication date

  • December 1987