Anomalies, Branes, and Currents

Abstract

When a D-brane wraps around a cycle of a curved manifold, the twisting of its normal bundle can induce chiral asymmetry in its worldvolume theory. We obtain the general form of the resulting anomalies for D-branes and their intersections. They are not cancelled among themselves, and the standard inflow mechanism does not apply at first sight because of their apparent lack of factorizability and the apparent vanishing of the corresponding inflow. We show however after taking into consideration the effects of the nontrivial topology of the normal bundles, the anomalies can be transformed into factorized forms and precisely cancelled by finite inflow from the Chern-Simons actions for the D-branes as long as the latter are well defined. We then consider examples in type II compactifications where the twisting of the normal bundles occurs and calculate the changes in the induced Ramond-Ramond charges on the D-branes.