D-brane Wess--Zumino actions, T-duality and the cosmological constant

TL;DR

This paper develops a geometric approach to T-duality in superstring theory, deriving D-brane Wess-Zumino actions including mass terms, and reveals implications for the quantization of the cosmological constant.

Contribution

It provides a new geometric formulation of T-duality rules and completes the derivation of D-brane Wess-Zumino actions with mass parameters, advancing understanding of IIA superstring theory.

Findings

Derived Wess-Zumino terms for D-branes including mass contributions.

Established non-abelian Chern-Simons terms imply cosmological constant quantization.

Unified geometric framework for T-duality and D-brane actions.

Abstract

A geometrical formulation of the T-duality rules for type II superstring Ramond--Ramond fields is presented. This is used to derive the Wess-Zumino terms in superstring D-brane actions, including terms proportional to the mass parameter of the IIA theory, thereby completing partial results in the literature. For non-abelian world-volume gauge groups the massive type IIA D-brane actions contain non-abelian Chern--Simons terms for the Born--Infeld gauge potential, implying a quantization of the IIA cosmological constant.