English

Can D-Branes Wrap Nonrepresentable Cycles?

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-11-11 v1

Abstract

Sometimes a homology cycle of a nonsingular compactification manifold cannot be represented by a nonsingular submanifold. We want to know whether such nonrepresentable cycles can be wrapped by D-branes. A brane wrapping a representable cycle carries a K-theory charge if and only if its Freed-Witten anomaly vanishes. However some K-theory charges are only carried by branes that wrap nonrepresentable cycles. We provide two examples of Freed-Witten anomaly-free D6-branes wrapping nonrepresentable cycles in the presence of a trivial NS 3-form flux. The first occurs in type IIA string theory compactified on the Sp(2) group manifold and the second in IIA on a product of lens spaces. We find that the first D6-brane carries a K-theory charge while the second does not.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0607045,
  title  = {Can D-Branes Wrap Nonrepresentable Cycles?},
  author = {Jarah Evslin and Hisham Sati},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0607045},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

11 pages, no figures