Light-cone analysis of ungauged and topologically gauged BLG theories

Journal article, 2009

We consider three-dimensional maximally superconformal Bagger-Lambert-Gustavsson (BLG) theory and its topologically gauged version (constructed recently in Gran and Nilsson (2009 J. High Energy Phys. JHEP03(2009) 074 (arXiv:0809.4478 [hep-th]))) in the light-cone gauge. After eliminating the entire Chern-Simons gauge field, the ungauged BLG light-cone theory looks more conventional and, apart from the order of the interaction terms, resembles N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. The light-cone superspace version of the BLG theory is given at the quadratic order together with a suggested form for the quartic terms. Some problems with constructing the sixth-order interaction terms are also discussed. In the topologically gauged case, we analyze the field equations related to the three Chern-Simons-type terms of N = 8 conformal supergravity and discuss some of the special features of this theory and its couplings to BLG.