Confinement on the Brane

Abstract

A non-perturbative confinement mechanism has been proposed to explain the fate of the unbroken gauge group on the world-volume of annihilating D-brane-anti-D-brane pairs. In this paper, we examine this phenomenon closely from several different perspectives. Existence of the confinement mechanism is most easily seen by noticing that the fundamental string emerges as the confined electric flux string at the end of the annihilation process. After reviewing the confinement proposal in general, this is shown explicitly in the D2-anti-D2 case in the M-theory limit. Finally, we address the crucial issue of whether and how confinement occurs in the weakly coupled limit of string theory.