Branes on group manifolds, gluon condensates, and twisted K-theory

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Published 18 April 2001 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation Stefan Fredenhagen and Volker Schomerus JHEP04(2001)007 DOI 10.1088/1126-6708/2001/04/007

1126-6708/2001/04/007

Abstract

In this work we study the dynamics of branes on group manifolds G deep in the stringy regime. After giving a brief overview of the various branes that can be constructed within the boundary conformal field theory approach, we analyze in detail the condensation processes that occur on stacks of such branes. At large volume our discussion is based on certain effective gauge theories on non-commutative `fuzzy' spaces. Using the `absorption of the boundary spin'-principle which was formulated by Affleck and Ludwig in their work on the Kondo model, we extrapolate the brane dynamics into the stringy regime. For supersymmetric theories, the resulting condensation processes turn out to be consistent with the existence of certain conserved charges taking values in some non-trivial discrete abelian groups. We obtain strong constraints on these charge groups for G = SU(N). The results may be compared with a recent proposal of Bouwknegt and Mathai according to which charge groups on curved spaces X (with a non-vanishing NSNS 3-form field strength H) are given by the twisted K-groups KH*(X).

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