Complex three-form supergravity and membranes

Understand

There exist two variants of the old minimal formulation for ${\cal N}=1$ supergravity in four dimensions, in which one or each of the two auxiliary scalars is replaced by the field strength of a gauge three-form.

• These theories are known as three-form supergravity and complex three-form supergravity, respectively.
• For each of them, we present a super-Weyl invariant coupling of supergravity to the supermembrane and prove kappa-invariance of the resulting action.
• In the case of three-form supergravity, we demonstrate that the action constructed reduces to that given by Ovrut and Waldram twenty years ago upon imposing a super-Weyl gauge in which the compensating three-form superfield is set to a constant.