On the covariance of the Dirac-Born-Infeld-Myers action

TL;DR

This paper develops a covariant non-abelian Dirac-Born-Infeld-Myers action incorporating fermionic degrees of freedom, aligning with T-duality and modifying the WZ term for consistency.

Contribution

It introduces a covariant formulation of the non-abelian DBI-Myers action with fermionic variables, matching Myers' results after quantisation and gauge fixing.

Findings

The covariant action agrees with Myers' action after quantisation.

A modified WZ term consistent with covariance is proposed.

The approach incorporates boundary fermions in a classical framework.

Abstract

A covariant version of the non-abelian Dirac-Born-Infeld-Myers action is presented. The non-abelian degrees of freedom are incorporated by adjoining to the (bosonic) worldvolume of the brane a number of anticommuting fermionic directions corresponding to boundary fermions in the string picture. The proposed action treats these variables as classical but can be given a matrix interpretation if a suitable quantisation prescription is adopted. After gauge-fixing and quantisation of the fermions, the action is shown to be in agreement with the Myers action derived from T-duality. It is also shown that the requirement of covariance in the above sense leads to a modified WZ term which also agrees with the one proposed by Myers.