## Tuesday, July 08, 2008

### Membrane minirevolution escalates

Because of The Independence Day when new preprints were not released, there are whopping 35 papers on the hep-th arXiv today.

At least five of them are dedicated to the membrane minirevolution - work following Bagger, Lambert; Gustavsson; and Aharony, Bergman, Jafferis, Maldacena: [12], [13], [20], [21], [34]. Not a bad daily outcome for one relatively new topic. During the summer, the Bagger-Lambert papers will surpass the 100-citation threshold.

The paper [12] carefully checks the gauge invariance and supersymmetry constraints on the BLG theory and proposes a generalization where the structure constants are no longer required to be fully antisymmetric.

Among other things, [13] gives a derivation of the N^{3/2} scaling of the degrees of freedom of the 3D SCFT theory. Using a truncated algebra, the degrees of freedom are assigned to "boxes" in a 3-dimensional square-like manifold while membranes are assigned to "boxes" in its 2-dimensional cross section: that gives you the law.

The work [20] explicitly verifies the OSp(6|4) superconformal symmetry of the ABJM theory.

The following preprint [21] gives a new simple provement - that's an Asian version of a proof - of a relationship between the M2- and D2-brane theory parameters. Finally, [34] finds new puzzles in the counting of the discrete vacua of the M2-brane theory that become especially striking in the case of a massive deformation of the Lorentzian 3-algebra theory.