On the effective action of stable non-BPS branes

Abstract

We study the world-volume effective action of stable non-BPS branes present in Type II theories compactified on K3. In particular, by exploiting the conformal description of these objects available in the orbifold limit, we argue that their world-volume effective theory can be chiral. The resulting anomalies are cancelled through the usual inflow mechanism provided there are anomalous couplings, similar to those of BPS branes, to the twisted R-R fields. We also show that this result is in agreement with the conjectured interpretation of these non-BPS configurations as BPS branes wrapped on non-supersymmetric cycles of the K3.