Selfdual strings and loop space Nahm equations

Abstract

We give two independent arguments why the classical membrane fields should be take values in a loop algebra. The first argument comes from how we may construct selfdual strings in the M5 brane from a loop space version of the Nahm equations. The second argument is that there appears to be no infinite set of finite-dimensional Lie algebras (such as su(N) for any N) that satisfies the algebraic structure of the membrane theory.