Generalised Cocycles and Super p-Branes (2206.03394v1)

Abstract: We study the cohomology (cocycles) of Lie superalgebras for the generalised complex of forms: superforms, pseudoforms and integral forms. We argue that these cocycles might be interpreted in the light of a new brane scan as generators of new higher-WZW terms and might provide new sources for supergravity. We use the technique of spectral sequences to abstractly compute the Chevalley-Eilenberg cohomology. We first focus on the superalgebra osp(2|2) and show that there exist non-empty cohomology spaces among pseudoforms related to sub-superalgebras. We then extend some classical theorems by Koszul to include pseudoforms and integral forms. Further, we conjecture that the Poincare' duality extends to Lie superalgebras, as long as all the complexes of forms are taken into account and we prove that this holds for osp}(2|2). We finally construct the cohomology representatives explicitly by using a distributional realisation of pseudoforms and integral forms. On one hand, these results show that the cohomology of Lie superalgebras is larger than expected; on the other hand, we show the emergence of completely new cohomology classes represented by pseudoforms. These classes represent integral form classes of sub-superstructures.