Strings, boundary fermions and coincident D-branes

Abstract

This thesis describes an attempt to write down covariant actions for coincident D-branes using so-called boundary fermions instead of matrices to describe the non-abelian fields. These fermions can be thought of as Chan-Paton degrees of freedom for the open string. It is shown that by gauge-fixing and by suitably quantizing these boundary fermions the non-abelian action that is known, the Myers action, can be reproduced. Furthermore it is shown that under natural assumptions, unlike the Myers action, the action formulated using boundary fermions also posseses kappa-symmetry when formulated on superspace. Another aspect of string theory discussed in this thesis is that of tensionless strings. These are of great interest for example because of their possible relation to higher spin gauge theories via the AdS/CFT-correspondence. The tensionless superstring in a plane wave background, a Penrose limit of the near-horizon geometry of a stack of D3-branes, is considered and compared to the tensile case.

110 pages, PhD Thesis; Errata added

References in corpus (22)

• Dirichlet-Branes and Ramond-Ramond Charges
• Strings in flat space and pp waves from $\mathcal{N}=4$ Super Yang Mills
• Dielectric-Branes
• On non-abelian generalisation of Born-Infeld action in string theory
• Massless Higher Spins and Holography
• Penrose limits and maximal supersymmetry
• Exactly solvable model of superstring in Ramond-Ramond plane wave background
• Super D-branes
• The Dirichlet Super-p-Branes in Ten-Dimensional Type IIA and IIB Supergravity
• D-Brane Actions with Local Kappa Symmetry
• Boundary String Field Theory of the DDbar System
• Fluctuation Spectra of Tilted and Intersecting D-branes from the Born-Infeld Action
• Superbranes and Superembeddings
• Classical and Quantized Tensionless Strings
• Tensionless Strings, WZW Models at Critical Level and Massless Higher Spin Fields
• On Brane Actions and Superembeddings
• Supersymmetric Born-Infeld from the Pure Spinor Formalism of the Open Superstring
• On the covariance of the Dirac-Born-Infeld-Myers action
• On the tensionless limit of gauged WZW models
• Kappa-symmetric non-abelian Born-Infeld actions in three dimensions
• Aspects of Superembeddings
• Introduction to Superstring Theory

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Holographic rho mesons in an external magnetic field
• Kappa-symmetry for coincident D-branes
• D-branes and Azumaya/matrix noncommutative differential geometry,II: Azumaya/matrix supermanifolds and differentiable maps therefrom -- with a view toward dynamical fermionic D-branes in string theory