A toy model of the M5-brane: Anomalies of monopole strings in five dimensions

We study a five-dimensional field theory which contains a monopole (string) solution with chiral fermion zero modes. This monostring solution is a close analog of the fivebrane solution of M-theory. The cancellation of normal bundle anomalies parallels that for the M-theory fivebrane; in particular, the presence of a Chern-Simons term in the low-energy effective U(1) gauge theory plays a central role. We comment on the relationship between the microscopic analysis of the world-volume theory and the low-energy analysis and draw some cautionary lessons for M-theory. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).