The Coupling of Yang-Mills to Extended Objects

TL;DR

This paper generalizes the coupling of Yang-Mills fields to extended objects like p-branes, revealing Chern-Simons corrections for odd p and confirming a conjecture related to string/5-brane duality.

Contribution

It extends the Yang-Mills coupling framework to higher-dimensional branes and analyzes the resulting Chern-Simons modifications for odd p.

Findings

Chern-Simons corrections for odd p-branes

Consistency with string/5-brane duality

Generalization of Yang-Mills coupling to extended objects

Abstract

The coupling of Yang-Mills fields to the heterotic string in bosonic formulation is generalized to extended objects of higher dimension (p-branes). For odd p, the Bianchi identities obeyed by the field strengths of the (p+1)-forms receive Chern-Simons corrections which, in the case of the 5-brane, are consistent with an earlier conjecture based on string/5-brane duality.