Ultra-violet Behavior of Bosonic Quantum Membranes

Abstract

We treat the action for a bosonic membrane as a sigma model, and then compute quantum corrections by integrating out higher membrane modes. As in string theory, where the equations of motion of Einstein's theory emerges by setting $\beta = 0$, we find that, with certain assumptions, we can recover the equations of motion for the background fields. Although the membrane theory is non-renormalizable on the world volume by power counting, the investigation of the ultra-violet behavior of membranes may give us insight into the supersymmetric case, where we hope to obtain higher order M-theory corrections to 11 dimensional supergravity.