(String Journal Club) Partition Functions in Chiral and Democratic Theories
ABSTRACT
In this Journal Club, I will review the construction of partition functions for chiral theories, following the seminal works of E. Witten, “Five-Brane Effective Action in M-Theory,”, hep-th/9610234, and D. Belov and G. W. Moore, “Holographic Action for the Self-Dual Field,” hep-th/0605038. I will summarize the key ingredients of their formalism, including the treatment of self-dual fields and the construction of consistent quantum partition functions. I will then explain how similar techniques can be adapted to the study of democratic M-theory, leading to a consistent computation of its partition function.
