Massive Branes

TL;DR

<3-5 sentence high-level summary describing the problem, approach, contributions, and impact: The paper investigates branes propagating in a bosonic sector of massive IIA supergravity, addressing how mass deforms their worldvolume theories and their M-theory origins. It develops a systematic framework of dual target-space fields and worldvolume p-forms, and constructs massive M-brane actions as gauged sigma models that reduce to pairs of massive IIA branes via direct and double dimensional reductions. A key finding is the emergence of new worldvolume couplings, notably 1-form and 6-form fields on the massive 5-brane, which have implications for anomalous brane creation and for the M-theoretic origin of the mass parameter. The work also proposes a massive 11D background that underlies massive IIA and discusses broader implications for dualities, higher-form fields, and potential M-theory extensions such as an M-9-brane scenario.

Abstract

We investigate the effective worldvolume theories of branes in a background given by (the bosonic sector of) 10-dimensional massive IIA supergravity (``massive branes'') and their M-theoretic origin. In the case of the solitonic 5-brane of type IIA superstring theory the construction of the Wess-Zumino term in the worldvolume action requires a dualization of the massive Neveu-Schwarz/Neveu-Schwarz target space 2-form field. We find that, in general, the effective worldvolume theory of massive branes contains new worldvolume fields that are absent in the massless case, i.e. when the mass parameter m of massive IIA supergravity is set to zero. We show how these new worldvolume fields can be introduced in a systematic way. In particular, we find new couplings between the massive solitonic 5-brane and the target space background, involving an additional worldvolume 1-form and 6-form. These new couplings have implications for the anomalous creation of branes. In particular, when a massive solitonic 5-brane passes through a D8-brane a stretched D6-brane is created. Similarly, in M-theory we find that when an M5-brane passes through an M9-brane a stretched Kaluza-Klein monopole is created. Pairs of massive branes of type IIA string theory can be viewed as the direct and double dimensional reduction of a single ``massive M-brane'' whose worldvolume theory is described by a gauged sigma model.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Each M-brane gives rise to a pair of type IIA branes both in the massive and massless cases. Vertical arrows indicate direct dimensional reduction (i.e. target-space dimensional reduction), slanted arrows indicate double dimensional reduction and horizontal arrows indicate worldvolume dimensional reduction together with gauge-fixing of some symmetries. As the figure indicates, double dimensional reduction is equivalent to direct dimensional reduction followed by worldvolume dimensional reduction and gauge-fixing. Upon direct dimensional reduction, the M-0-brane gives the D-0-brane or the ten-dimensional Brinkmann wave W10 depending on whether the M-0-brane has momentum along the 11th dimension or not, respectively.