A New Approach to the Classical and Quantum Dynamics of Branes

Abstract

It is shown that the Dirac-nambu-Goto brane can be described as a point particle in an infinite dimensional brane space with a particular metric. This suggests a generalization to brane spaces with arbitrary metric, including the "flat" metric. Then quantization of such a system is straightforward: it is just like quantization of a bunch of non interacting particles. This leads us to a system of a continuous set of scalar fields. For a particular choice of the metric in the space of fields we find that the classical Dirac-Nambu-Goto brane theory arises as an effective theory of such an underlying quantum field theory. Quantization of branes is important for the brane world scenarios, and thus for "quantum gravity".