The ground state of the D=11 supermembrane and matrix models on compact regions

Abstract: We establish a general framework for the analysis of boundary value problems of matrix models at zero energy on compact regions. We derive existence and uniqueness of ground state wavefunctions for the mass operator of the $D=11$ regularized supermembrane theory, that is the $\mathcal{N}=16$ supersymmetric $SU(N)$ matrix model, on balls of finite radius. Our results rely on the structure of the associated Dirichlet form and a factorization in terms of the supersymmetric charges. They also rely on the polynomial structure of the potential and various other supersymmetric properties of the system.