For , changing radial coordinate to gives an AdS metric of radius times a round sphere of radius . The Freund-Rubin compactification flux has magnitude in the AdS volume form. This is the regular positive-charge membrane throat, rather than the limit of an arbitrary singular harmonic multipole.
// Target: supersymmetry.bigb
With the membrane Freund-Rubin compactification flux and the required radius ratio, the Killing spinor equation separates into AdS4 and sphere equations with correlated signs. The respective real solution dimensions are four and eight, giving thirty-two. The associated Killing-spinor connections have vanishing curvature for these choices, so arbitrary initial spinor data generate solutions locally; standard global spin structures give the usual maximally supersymmetric background.
// Target: geometry-and-topology.bigb
For bosonic embedding coordinates , the supermembrane action truncates to
The first term is its induced worldvolume volume and the second is its Wess-Zumino brane coupling. A membrane of the opposite orientation reverses .
The M2-brane supergravity solution admits the harmonic function
with arbitrary centre positions in eight transverse dimensions. Away from the sources, the Laplacian of each term is zero. The unrestricted positions describe static separated membranes carrying aligned charges, so their separations have no potential. Physically, their gravitational attraction is cancelled by their four-form charge repulsion. This is the M2-brane probe no-force identity, which can also be checked directly without relying only on the existence of the multicentre solution.
Keep the field-strength ordering printed in the paper and use . If , a gauge vanishing at infinity is
The last equality uses the sign acquired by moving a one-form past a three-form. For this convention the parallel probe has . In static gauge, at a fixed transverse position, its induced worldvolume metric is , hence and
Using the opposite convention for , and orientation together yields the same cancellation. Changing only the probe charge produces an anti-membrane, with nonconstant potential . Thus the orientation cannot be dropped from the argument.
The cancellation also survives an expansion for slow transverse motion. With ,
There is no static potential and no position dependence in the leading kinetic coefficient.
Near an isolated positive membrane charge, write with and . The regular membrane near-horizon limit removes the asymptotically flat constant and gives
Set . Then
Thus the Anti-de Sitter spacetime radius is half the sphere radius. In orthonormal units the four-form has magnitude along the AdS volume form, the Freund-Rubin compactification flux.
The full asymptotically flat solution has spinors subject to one oriented membrane projector, leaving sixteen real parameters. In the throat, the Killing spinor equation separates into the standard AdS and sphere equations with correlated signs fixed by the flux. There are four real AdS solutions and eight real solutions for the required signs, so
This is maximal supersymmetry of AdS4 times S7: the additional sixteen spinors need not extend through the asymptotically flat region. A multicentre geometry therefore remains globally sixteen-supersymmetric even though each regular local throat has this enhancement. The classical supergravity description is controlled when is large compared with the eleven-dimensional Planck length; singular harmonic multipoles not representing regular positive membrane centres do not automatically have the same throat.