A new look at anomaly cancellation in heterotic M-theory

This Letter considers anomaly cancellation for eleven-dimensional supergravity on a manifold with boundary and theories related to heterotic M-theory. The Green-Schwartz mechanism is implemented without introducing distributions. The importance of the supersymmetry anomaly in constructing the low energy action is discussed and it is argued that a recently proposed action for low-energy heterotic M-theory gives a supersymmetric theory to all orders in the gravitational coupling κ.