Deformations of 3-algebras

Abstract

We phrase deformations of n-Leibniz algebras in terms of the cohomology theory of the associated Leibniz algebra. We do the same for n-Lie algebras and for the metric versions of n-Leibniz and n-Lie algebras. We place particular emphasis on the case of n=3 and explore the deformations of 3-algebras of relevance to three-dimensional superconformal Chern--Simons theories with matter.