A note on D-branes in group manifolds: flux quantisation and D0-charge

We show that a D-brane in a group manifold given by a (twisted) conjugacy class is characterised by a gauge invariant two-form field determined in terms of the matrix of gluing conditions. Using a quantisation argument based on the path integral one obtains the known quantisation condition for the corresponding D-branes. We find no evidence for the existence of a quantised U(1) gauge field flux. We propose an expression for the D0 charge of such D-branes.Comment: 13 pages. (v2: minor changes, some comments and references added.

D-branes in curved spacetime: Nappi-Witten background

We find exact D-brane configurations in the Nappi-Witten background using the boundary state approach and describe how they are related by T-duality transformations. We also show that the classical boundary conditions of the associated sigma model correspond to a field dependent automorphism relating the chiral currents and discuss the correspondence between the boundary state approach and the sigma model approach.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, references adde

The energy operator for infinite statistics

We construct the energy operator for particles obeying infinite statistics defined by a q-deformation of the Heisenberg algebra. (This paper appeared published in CMP in 1992, but was not archived at the time.)Comment: 6 page

Supersymmetric Integrable Hierarchies and String Theory

This thesis is roughly organized into two parts. The first one (the first three chapters), expository in nature, attempts to place the current work in context: at first historically, but then focusing on the Lax formalism and the Adler--Gel'fand--Dickey scheme for hierarchies of the KdV type. The second part (the last four chapters) comprises the main body of this work. It begins by developing the supersymmetric Lax formalism, introducing the ring of formal superpseudodifferential operators and the associated Poisson structures. We discuss three supersymmetric extensions of the KP hierarchy (MRSKP, \SKP2, and JSKP). We define and compute their additional symmetries and we find that the algebra of additional symmetries are in all three cases isomorphic to the Lie algebra of superdifferential operators. We discuss a new reduction of \SKP2 and the relation between MRSKP and \SKP2 is clarified. Finally we consider the (so far) only integrable hierarchy to have played a role in noncritical superstring theory (sKdV-B). We identify it, prove its bihamiltonian integrability, and extend it by odd flows. We close with a discussion of new integrable supersymmetrizations of the KdV-like hierarchies suggested by the study of sKdV-B. (This is the author's PhD Thesis from the Physics Deparment of the University of Bonn, July 1994.)Comment: 118 pages, uuencoded compressed .dvi files + 4 figures. Requires epsf.tex and the AMSFonts (v. 2.1+), BONN-IR-94-0

On the structure of symmetric self-dual Lie algebras

A finite-dimensional Lie algebra is called (symmetric) self-dual, if it possesses an invariant nondegenerate (symmetric) bilinear form. Symmetric self-dual Lie algebras have been studied by Medina and Revoy, who have proven a very useful theorem about their structure. In this paper we prove a refinement of their theorem which has wide applicability in Conformal Field Theory, where symmetric self-dual Lie algebras start to play an important role due to the fact that they are precisely the Lie algebras which admit a Sugawara construction. We also prove a few corollaries which are important in Conformal Field Theory. (This paper provides mathematical details of results used, but only sketched, in the companion paper hep-th/9506151.)Comment: 19 pages, .dvi.uu (needs AMSFonts 2.1+

Nonsemisimple Sugawara Constructions

By a Sugawara construction we mean a generalized Virasoro construction in which the currents are primary fields of conformal weight one. For simple Lie algebras, this singles out the standard Sugawara construction out of all the solutions to the Virasoro master equation. Examples of nonsemisimple Sugawara constructions have appeared recently. They share the properties that the Virasoro central charge is an integer equal to the dimension of the Lie algebra and that they can be obtained by high-level contraction of reductive Sugawara constructions: they thus correspond to free bosons. Exploiting a recent structure theorem for Lie algebras with an invariant metric, we are able to unify all the known constructions under the same formalism and, at the same time, to prove several results about the Sugawara constructions. In particular, we prove that all such constructions factorize into a standard (semisimple) Sugawara construction and a nonsemisimple one (with integral central charge) of a form which generalizes the nonsemisimple examples known so far.Comment: uuencoded compressed .dvi file (needs AMSFonts 2.1+), 13 document pages but 7 physical page

Gauged Wess-Zumino terms and Equivariant Cohomology

We summarize some results obtained on the problem of gauging the Wess--Zumino term of a d-dimensional bosonic sigma-model. We show that gauged WZ-like terms are in one-to-one correspondence with equivariant cocycles of the target space. By the same token, the obstructions to gauging a WZ term can be understood in terms of the equivariant cohomology of the target space and this allows us to use topological tools to derive some a priori vanishing theorems guaranteeing the absence of obstructions for a large class of target spaces and symmetry groups in the physically interesting dimensions d<=4. (This is an expository summary of the results of hep-th/9407149.)Comment: 11 pages, uuencoded compressed .dvi file (uses AMSFonts 2.1+), QMW-PH-94-2