Interactions of Domain Walls of SUSY Yang-Mills as D-Branes

Abstract

Domain walls in supersymmetric Yang-Mills are BPS configurations which preserve two supercharges of the parent theory and so their tensions are known exactly. On the other hand, they have been described as D-branes for the confining string. This leads to a description of their collective dynamics in terms of a 2+1 -dimensional gauge theory with two supersymmetries and a Chern-Simons term. We show that this open string description can capture the qualitative behaviour of the forces between the domain walls for an arbitrary configuration of n walls at leading order in 1/N, extending earlier calculations for two walls. The potential admits a supersymmetric bound state when the n walls are all coincident and asymptotes to a constant at large separation with an n dependence which agrees perfectly with the exact tension formula.