A Picture of D-branes at Strong Coupling

Abstract

We use a phase space description to (re)derive a first order form of the Born-Infeld action for D-branes. This derivation also makes it possible to consider the limit where the tension of the D-brane goes to zero. We find that in this limit, which can be considered to be the strong coupling limit of the fundamental string theory, the world-volume of the D-brane generically splits into a collection of tensile strings.