The Spinning Membrane and Skyrmions Revisited

Abstract

A local world volume Q-supersymmetric Weyl invariant Lagrangian for the membrane is presented. An analysis is provided which solves the problems raised by some authors in the past concerning the algebraic elimination of the auxiliary fields belonging to the coupling function supermultiplet. The starting bosonic action is the one given by Dolan and Tchrakian with vanishing cosmological constant and with quadratic, quartic derivative terms. Our Lagrangian differs from the one of Lindstrom and Rocek in the fact that is polynomial in the fields facilitating the quantization process. It is argued, rigorously, that if one wishes to construct polynomial actions without curvature terms and where supersymmetry is linearly realized, after the elimination of auxiliary fields, one must relinquish S supersymmetry and concentrate solely on the Q-supersymmetry associated with the superconformal algebra in three dimensions. The role that this spinning membrane action may have in the theory of D-branes, Skyrmions and BPS monopoles is also pointed out.