Holographic M-brane super-embeddings

Abstract

Over a decade before the modern formulation of AdS/CFT duality, Duff et al. had observed a candidate microscopic explanation by identifying the CFT fields with fluctuations of probe p-branes stretched out in parallel near the horizon of their own black brane incarnation. A profound way to characterize these and more general probe p-brane configurations, especially for M5-branes, is expected to be as “super-embeddings” of their super-worldvolumes into target super-spacetime — but no concrete example of these had appeared in the literature. Here we fill this gap by constructing the explicit holographic 1/2-BPS super-embeddings of probe M5-branes and M2-branes into their corresponding super-AdS backgrounds.