World-volume action of the M-theory five-brane Original Research Article

This paper presents a 6d world-volume action that describes the dynamics of the M-theory five-brane in a flat 11 d space-time background. The world-volume action has global 11d super-Poincaré invariance, as well as 6d general coordinate invariance and kappa symmetry, which are realized as local symmetries. The paper mostly considers a formulation in which general coordinate invariance is not manifest in one direction. However, it also describes briefly an alternative formulation, due to Pasti, Sorokin, and Tonin, in which general coordinate invariance is manifest. The latter approach requires auxiliary fields and new gauge invariances.