Blending Local Symmetries With Matrix Nonlocality in D-brane Effective Actions

Abstract

In systems of intersecting branes, we consider sets of directions in which one type of brane is pointlike, with transverse fluctuations described by matrix coordinates X, and the other set of branes is space-filling, with a local symmetry associated to its worldvolume gauge field. Under this symmetry, massless fields associated with p-p' strings should transform in the fundamental representation, \Phi \to U(X) \Phi, but this transformation rule is ill-defined when X is a general matrix. In this paper, we make sense of this transformation rule for \Phi and show that imposing gauge invariance using the resulting rule places strong constraints on the effective actions, determining infinite series of terms in the \alpha' expansion. We describe the most general invariant effective actions and note that these are written most simply in terms of covariant objects built from \Phi which transform like fundamental fields living on the whole space-filling brane. Our description leads us to introduce several interesting structures, including Wilson lines from ordinary points to matrix locations, pull-backs of fields from matrix geometries to ordinary space, and delta functions which localize to matrix configurations.