D-Brane Wess-Zumino Terms and U-Duality

TL;DR

This paper develops gauge-invariant, U-duality covariant Wess-Zumino terms for Dp-branes in various dimensions, revealing how brane charges relate to 0-brane charges and doubled geometry.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, covariant formulation of Wess-Zumino terms for D-branes across multiple dimensions, incorporating doubled geometry features.

Findings

Wess-Zumino terms contain twice as many scalars as compactified dimensions.

Higher-dimensional brane charges can be expressed as products of 0-brane charges.

The charges determine the conjugacy classes of D-branes.

Abstract

We construct gauge-invariant and U-duality covariant expressions for Wess-Zumino terms corresponding to general Dp-branes (for any p<D) in arbitrary 2<D<11 dimensions. A distinguishing feature of these Wess-Zumino terms is that they contain twice as many scalars as the 10-D compactified dimensions, in line with doubled geometry. We find that for D<10 the charges of the higher-dimensional branes can all be expressed as products of the 0-brane charges, which include the D0-brane and the NS-NS 0-brane charges. We give the general expressions for these charges and show how they determine the non-trivial conjugacy class to which some of the higher-dimensional D-branes belong.