Dielectric branes

Oct, 1999
32 pages
Published in:
  • JHEP 12 (1999) 022
e-Print:
Report number:
  • MCGILL-99-27,
  • NSF-ITP-99-113

Citations per year

19992006201320202025020406080100120
Abstract:
We extend the usual world-volume action for a Dp-brane to the case of N coincident Dp-branes where the world-volume theory involves a U(N) gauge theory. The guiding principle in our construction is that the action should be consistent with the familiar rules of T-duality. The resulting action involves a variety of potential terms, i.e., nonderivative interactions, for the nonabelian scalar fields. This action also shows that Dp-branes naturally couple to RR potentials of all form degrees, including both larger and smaller than p+1. We consider the dynamics resulting from this action for Dp-branes moving in nontrivial background fields, and illustrate how the Dp-branes are ``polarized'' by external fields. In a simple example, we show that a system of D0-branes in an external RR four-form field expands into a noncommutative two-sphere, which is interpreted as the formation of a spherical D2-D0 bound state.
  • membrane model: dielectric
  • gauge field theory: U(N)
  • duality: T-duality
  • field theory: scalar
  • bound state
  • Born-Infeld model
  • Chern-Simons term
  • matrix model