Exceptional N=6 and N=2 AdS_4 Supergravity, and Zero-Center Modules

Abstract

We study the gauging of the orthosymplectic algebras OSp(6|4)xSO(2) and its "dual" OSp(2|4)x SO(6), both based on supergravities with the same exceptional coset SO*(12)/U(6), and gauge group SO(6)xSO(2). The two dual theories are obtained by two different truncations of gauged N=8 AdS_4 supergravity. We explicitly study the gauge sector of the two dual theories with the most general group allowed by supersymmetry. In the ungauged (super-Poincaré) case they exhibit the same (large) black-hole attractor solutions with dual relations between the 1/N-BPS and non-BPS configurations. The N=6 gravity multiplet has also the exceptional property to be a {\em zero-center module} of OSp(6|4), as it is the case for superconformal Yang--Mills theory in four dimensions based on SU(2,2|n) (PSU(2,2|4) for n=4) or OSp(n|4).

27 pages, LaTeX source, typos and formulas in Section 4 corrected, references added, Section 5 and Appendix C added