M5-brane in the superspace approach
Laura Andrianopoli, C. A. Cremonini, Riccardo D’Auria, Pietro Antonio Grassi, R. Matrecano, R. Noris, Lucrezia Ravera, Mario Trigiante
Abstract
Motivated by Sen's spacetime prescription for the construction of theories with self-dual field strengths, we present a rigid superspace Lagrangian describing noninteracting tensor multiplets living on a stack of M5-branes and containing all the physical constraints on the fields, yielding the on-shell matching of the degrees of freedom. The geometric superspace approach adopted here offers a natural realization of superdiffeomorphisms and is particularly well suited for the coupling to supergravity. However, within this formulation the (anti-)self-duality property of the 3-form field strengths is lost when the superspace Lagrangian is trivially restricted to spacetime. We propose two main paths to address this issue: a first-order superspace extension of Sen's spacetime results, which, once trivially restricted to spacetime, yields all the dynamical equations including the (anti-)self-duality constraint on the 3-form field strengths, and a possible way to obtain a full superspace description of the theory, based on integral forms.