Strings, p-Branes and Dp-Branes With Dynamical Tension

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new class of brane models where the tension is a dynamical field, leading to novel gauge interactions and a classical mechanism for charge confinement on branes.

Contribution

It develops brane models with dynamical tension and higher-rank gauge fields, extending p-brane and Dp-brane theories with new physical insights.

Findings

Dynamical tension acts as an electric field strength of world-volume gauge fields.

Higher-rank gauge fields naturally couple to lower-dimensional charged branes.

The model provides a classical mechanism for charge confinement on branes.

Abstract

We discuss a new class of brane models (extending both p-brane and Dp-brane cases) where the brane tension appears as an additional dynamical degree of freedom instead of being put in by hand as an ad hoc dimensionfull scale. Consistency of dynamics naturally involves the appearence of additional higher-rank antisymmetric tensor gauge fields on the world-volume which can couple to charged lower-dimensional branes living on the original Dp-brane world-volume. The dynamical tension has the physical meaning of electric-type field strength of the additional higher-rank world-volume gauge fields. It obeys Maxwell (or Yang-Mills) equations of motion (in the string case p=1) or their higher-rank gauge theory analogues (in the Dp-brane case). This in particular triggers a simple classical mechanism of ("color") charge confinement.