Introductory Lectures on D-Branes
Abstract
This is a pedagogical introduction to D-branes, addressed to graduate students in field theory and particle physics and to other beginners in string theory. I am not going to review the most recent results since there are already many good papers on web devoted to that. Instead, I will present some old techniques in some detail in order to show how some basic properties of strinfs and branes as the massless spectrum of string, the effective action of D-branes and their tension can be computed using QFT techniques. Also, I will present shortly the boundary state description of D-branes. The details are exposed for bosonic branes since I do not assume any previous knowledge of supersymmetry which is not a requirement for this school. However, for completeness and to provide basic notions for other lectures, I will discuss some properties of supersymemtric branes. The present lectures were delivered at Jorge Andr\'e Swieca School on Particle and Fields, 2001, Campos do Jord\~ao, Brazil.
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