On the non-abelian Born-Infeld action

Abstract

We discuss some aspects of the generalization of the Born-Infeld action to non-abelian gauge groups and show how the discrepancy between Tseytlin's symmetrized trace proposal and string theory can be corrected at order $F^6$. We also comment on the possible quadratic order fermionic terms.

5 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX, uses cargese.cls (included). To appear in the gong show section of the proceedings of Cargese'99 summer school "Progress in String Theory and M-theory"