“…[3,4]), and up to the possibility of a deformation that promotes the vector fields to nonabelian gauge bosons [5,6,7,8], its structure seems to be uniquely determined. As the model with gauge group 1 SO(8) arises from the compactification of D = 11 supergravity on a highly symmetric space -the seven-sphere S 7 -it occupies a prominent place in the family of supersymmetric field theory models, and as such it is not surprising to see that detailed information about its properties turned out to have a number of interesting applications [9,10,11,12,13]. Most of these are, of course, related to the AdS/CFT correspondence [14], as the vacua of SO(8)-gauged N = 8 supergravity correspond to stationary points in the scalar potential with negative (Planck-scale) cosmological constant, hence an Anti de-Sitter background geometry.…”