World-Volume Interactions on D-Branes

Abstract

We examine in detail various string scattering amplitudes in order to extract the world-volume interactions of massless fields on a Dirichlet brane. We find that the leading low-energy interactions are consistent with the Born-Infeld and Chern-Simons actions. In particular, our results confirm that the background closed string fields appearing in these actions must be treated as functionals of the non-abelian scalar fields describing transverse fluctuations of the D-brane.

14 pages