Multi-Body Interactions of D-Particles in Supergravity and Matrix Theory

We present detailed analyses of the 3-body interactions of D-particles from both sides of 11 dimensional supergravity and Matrix theory. In supergravity, we derive a complete expression for the classical bosonic effective action for D-particles including two-and threebody interaction terms. In Matrix theory, we compute 1-particle irreducible contributions to the eikonal phase shift in the two-loop approximation. The results precisely agree with the predictions from supergravity and thus provide a strong support to the discrete light-cone interpretation of the Matrix-theory conjecture as a possible nonperturbative definition of M-theory. ∗ e-mail address: [email protected] † e-mail address: [email protected] 1