Fluctuation Spectra of Tilted and Intersecting D-branes from the Born-Infeld Action

TL;DR

This paper investigates the fluctuation spectra of tilted and intersecting D-branes using the Born-Infeld action, revealing its effectiveness and limitations in capturing low-energy physics, especially for non-zero field strengths and non-abelian cases.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the Born-Infeld action accurately reproduces the low-energy spectrum of D-branes with non-zero field strength and explores its extension to non-supersymmetric and non-abelian configurations.

Findings

Born-Infeld action matches string spectra at zero field strength

Full Born-Infeld captures spectra for non-zero field strength

Discrepancy in non-abelian case suggests need for further refinement

Abstract

We consider the spectra of excitations around diagonal and intersecting D-brane configurations on tori. These configurations are described by constant curvature connections in a dual gauge theory description. The low-energy string fluctuation spectrum is reproduced exactly by the gauge theory in the case of vanishing field strength; however, this correspondence breaks down for fixed nonzero field strength. We show that in many cases the full Born-Infeld action correctly captures the low-energy spectrum in the case of non-vanishing field strength. This gives a field theory description of the low-energy physics of systems of diagonally wound branes and branes at angles as considered by Berkooz, Douglas and Leigh. This description extends naturally to non-supersymmetric configurations, where the tachyonic instability associated with brane-anti-brane systems appears as an instability around a saddle point solution of the corresponding Yang-Mills/Born-Infeld theory. In some cases, the field theory description requires a non-abelian generalization of the Born-Infeld action. We follow Tseytlin's recent proposal for formulating such an action. In the case of intersecting branes, the non-abelian Born-Infeld theory produces a transcendental relation which comes tantalizingly close to reproducing the correct spectrum; however, a discrepancy remains which indicates that a further clarification of the non-abelian Born-Infeld action may be necessary.