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The Wess-Zumino-Witten term of the M5-brane and differential cohomotopy
We combine rational homotopy theory and higher Lie theory to describe the Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) term in the M5-brane sigma model. We observe that this term admits a natural interpretation as a twisted 7-cocycle on super-Minkowski spacetime with coefficients in the rational 4-sphere. This exhibits the WZW term as an element …