Realization of Brane Descent Relations in Effective Theories

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how effective field theories of D-brane systems can reproduce brane descent relations, showing universality in the resulting low-energy theories for non-BPS and BPS branes.

Contribution

It shows that fluctuations around kink and vortex solutions in effective theories reproduce the expected low-energy content of lower-dimensional branes, generalizing previous models.

Findings

Fluctuations around kink reproduce non-BPS D-brane matter content.

Vortex fluctuations yield massless fields on BPS D-branes.

Results are universal, independent of specific effective action forms.

Abstract

We examine Sen's descent relations among (non-)BPS D-branes by using low energy effective field theories of DpDpbar system. We find that the fluctuation around the kink solution reproduces the low energy matter content on a non-BPS D(p-1)-brane. The effective action for these fluctuation modes turns out to be a generalization of Minahan-Zwiebach model. In addition, it is shown that the fluctuations around the vortex solution consist of massless fields on a BPS D(p-2)-brane and they are subject to Dirac-Born-Infeld action. We find the universality that the above results do not refer to particular forms of the effective action.