Nonrelativistic expansion of M2 branes and M theory backgrounds

Abstract

We initiate a systematic analysis of the nonrelativistic membrane solutions of M theory using the notion of 11d membrane Newton-Cartan (MNC) geometry as well as considering a 1/c2 expansion for the embedding fields of the M2 brane world-volume theory. We discuss the associated boost and dilatation symmetries of the nonrelativistic world-volume theory at leading order in the 1/c expansion. We show that, in the static gauge, when the world-volume directions of the nonrelativistic M2 brane are stretched along the longitudinal axes of the target space geometry, the leading order action in the 1/c expansion becomes trivial. In other words, the nontrivial dynamics appears to be only at NLO and beyond. In our analysis, we focus on such embeddings only and obtain the corresponding dispersion relation associated with the nonrelativistic world-volume theory.