Supergravity instantons and the universal hypermultiplet

The effective action of N=2 supersymmetric 5-dimensional supergravity arising from compactifications of M-theory on Calabi-Yau threefolds receives non-perturbative corrections from wrapped Euclidean membranes and fivebranes. These contributions can be interpreted as instanton corrections in the 5 dimensional field theory. Focusing on the universal hypermultiplet, a solution of this type is presented and the instanton action is calculated, generalizing previous results involving membrane instantons. The instanton action is not a sum of membrane and fivebrane contributions: it has the form reminiscent of non-threshold bound states. (author)