Fermions, T-duality and effective actions for D-branes in bosonic backgrounds

TL;DR

This paper derives explicit covariant effective actions for D-branes in general bosonic supergravity backgrounds, using reduction from M2-branes and T-duality, up to second order in fermions.

Contribution

It provides a unified, explicit form of D-brane actions in bosonic backgrounds, extending previous work by including fermionic terms and employing T-duality.

Findings

Explicit covariant D-brane actions up to second order in fermions.

Unified compact expression for all Dp-brane actions.

Methodology based on M2-brane reduction and T-duality.

Abstract

We find the effective action for any D-brane in a general bosonic background of supergravity. The results are explicit in component fields up to second order in the fermions and are obtained in a covariant manner. No interaction terms between fermions and the field $f=b+F$, characteristic of the bosonic actions, are considered. These are reserved for future work. In order to obtain the actions, we reduce directly from the M2-brane world-volume action to the D2-brane world-volume action. Then, by means of T-duality, we obtain the other Dp-brane actions. The resulting Dp-brane actions can be written in a single compact and elegant expression.