On the exact evaluation of the membrane instanton superpotential in M-theory on G2-holonomy manifolds -: art. no. 056

Following the work of [1] on the exact evaluation of the non-perturbative contribution to the superpotential from open-membrane instanton in Heterotic M-theory, we evaluate systematically the contribution to the superpotential of a membrane instanton obtained by wrapping of a single M2-brane, once, on an isolated supersymmetric 3-cycle in a G(2)-holonomy manifold. We then try to relate the results obtained to those sketched out in [2]. We also do a heat-kernel asymptotics analysis to see whether one gets similar UV-divergent terms for (one or both of) the bosonic and fermionic determinants indicative of (partial) cancellation among them. The answer is in the affirmative, as expected by the supersymmetry of the starting membrane action. This work is a first step, both, in extending the work of [2] to the evaluation of non-perturbative superpotentials for non-rigid supersymmetric 3-cycle wrappings, and in understanding the large-N Chern-Simons/closed type-A topological string theory duality of [3] from M-theory point of view.