Triality and Bagger–Lambert theory

Abstract

We present two alternative field contents for Bagger–Lambert theory, based on the triality of SO(8). The first content is (φAa,χA˙a;Aμab), where the bosonic field φ is in the 8S of SO(8) instead of the 8V as in the original Bagger–Lambert formulation. The second field content is (φA˙a,χIa;Aμab), where the bosonic field φ and the fermionic field χ are respectively in the 8C and 8V of SO(8). In both of these field contents, the bosonic potentials are positive definite, as desired. Moreover, these bosonic potentials can be unified by the triality of SO(8). To this end, we see a special constant matrix as a product of two SO(8) generators playing an important role, relating the 8V,8S and 8C of SO(8) for the triality. As an important application, we give the supersymmetry transformation rule for N=6 superconformal Chern–Simons theory with the supersymmetry parameter in the 6 of SO(6), obtained by the truncation of our first field content.