Holographic M-Brane Super-Embeddings
Grigorios Giotopoulos, Hisham Sati, Urs Schreiber
TL;DR
The paper addresses microscopic holography by constructing explicit $1/2$-BPS holographic super-embeddings of probe M5- and M2-branes into their near-horizon super-AdS backgrounds, using explicit rheonomy in $11d$ supergravity. It develops a detailed $11d$ rheonomy framework under gravitino-flat conditions, then builds explicit holographic M5 and M2 embeddings in $AdS_7\times S^4$ and $AdS_4\times S^7$, respectively, identifying the required $G_4$ flux factors with signs that permit a fluxless worldvolume sector. The main contributions are the explicit, non-trivial M5/M2 super-embeddings, the demonstration that worldvolume flux $H_3$ vanishes in these fluxless cases, and the establishment of a rigorous, inductive proof for the existence and uniqueness (up to orientation) of these embeddings. These results provide a concrete geometric realization of holographic fluctuations on probe branes and lay groundwork for analyzing worldvolume conformal dynamics and flux-quantization effects in a companion work.
Abstract
Over a decade before the modern formulation of AdS/CFT duality, Duff et al. had observed a candidate microscopic explanation by identifying the CFT fields with fluctuations of probe p-branes stretched out in parallel near the horizon of their own black brane incarnation. A profound way to characterize these and more general probe p-brane configurations, especially for M5-branes, is expected to be as "super-embeddings" of their super-worldvolumes into target super-spacetime - but no concrete example of these had appeared in the literature. Here we fill this gap by constructing the explicit holographic super-embeddings of probe M5-branes and M2-branes into their corresponding super-AdS backgrounds.