D-Brane effective Lagrangian in spacetimes with boundaries

Abstract

In this study, we explore the transformation of \(D_p\)-branes to \(D_{p-1}\)-branes under T-duality when the D-brane is embedded in a spacetime with a boundary. Our goal is to derive the higher-derivative corrections to the Dirac–Born–Infeld (DBI) Lagrangian for both the bulk and boundary terms. For the bulk terms, we calculate the \(\alpha '\) corrections for the massless open string fields, up to the 8th order in the dimensionless Maxwell field strength. We demonstrate that the bulk Lagrangian can satisfy the T-duality constraint without residual total derivative terms in the base space. This determines the most general independent couplings of the massless open string fields in the bulk Lagrangian, encompassing 145 coupling constants, up to three parameters. Two of these parameters are physical and are determined by disk-level S-matrix elements, while the third is unphysical and can be eliminated by field redefinitions and integration by parts. The final result for the bulk Lagrangian consists of 49 couplings. For the boundary terms, the application of T-duality symmetry to massless open and closed string fields enables us to extend the DBI Lagrangian to include the boundary unit normal vector field \(n_\mu \) and its first derivative.