Twistor variables for Anti-de Sitter (super)particles

Alex S. Arvanitakis, Alec E. Barns-Graham, Paul K. Townsend

Published 2016-08-15Version 1

Starting from the classical action for a spin-zero particle in a (D + 1)-dimensional anti-Sitter spacetime, we recover the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound by quantization. We then find a twistor form of the action for D = 3, 4, 6 for which the SO(2, D) isometry group is a linearly realized symmetry. The supertwistor generalization yields superparticle actions that are manifestly invariant under the isometry supergroup of the near-horizon geometries of the M2, D3 and M5 brane solutions of string/M-theory; in each case quantization yields a supermultiplet with 128 + 128 states.