Corrections to the Abelian Born-Infeld Action Arising from Noncommutative Geometry

In a recent paper Seiberg and Witten have argued that the full action describing the dynamics of coincident branes in the weak coupling regime is invariant under a specific field redefinition, which replaces the group of ordinary gauge transformations with the one of noncommutative gauge theory. This paper represents a first step towards the classification of invariant actions, in the simpler setting of the abelian single brane theory. In particular we consider a simplified model, in which the group of noncommutative gauge transformations is replaced with the group of symplectic diffeomorphisms of the brane world volume. We carefully define what we mean, in this context, by invariant actions, and rederive the known invariance of the Born-Infeld volume form. With the aid of a simple algebraic tool, which is a generalization of the Poisson bracket on the brane world volume, we are then able to describe invariant actions with an arbitrary number of derivatives.Comment: 16 page

The Picard group of the moduli stack of stable hyperelliptic curves

We compute the Picard group of the moduli stack of stable hyperelliptic curves of any genus, exhibiting explicit and geometrically meaningful generators and relations.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX; corrected minor errors, added reference

Some Computations with Seiberg-Witten Invariant Actions

We show, with a 2-dimensional example, that the low energy effective action which describes the physics of a single D-brane is compatible with T-duality whenever the corresponding U(N) non-abelian action is form-invariant under the non-commutative Seiberg-Witten transformations.Comment: Contributions to the conference BRANE NEW WORLD and Noncommutative Geometry, Torino, (Italy) Oct., 200

Matrix Representations of Holomorphic Curves on T4T_{4}

We construct a matrix representation of compact membranes analytically embedded in complex tori. Brane configurations give rise, via Bergman quantization, to U(N) gauge fields on the dual torus, with almost-anti-self-dual field strength. The corresponding U(N) principal bundles are shown to be non-trivial, with vanishing instanton number and first Chern class corresponding to the homology class of the membrane embedded in the original torus. In the course of the investigation, we show that the proposed quantization scheme naturally provides an associative star-product over the space of functions on the surface, for which we give an explicit and coordinate-invariant expression. This product can, in turn, be used the quantize, in the sense of deformation quantization, any symplectic manifold of dimension two.Comment: 29 page