Imperial/TP/98-99/67 hep-th/9908105 Born-Infeld action, supersymmetry and string theory ⋆ A.A. Tseytlin † Theoretical Physics Group, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, London SW7 2BZ, U.K. Abstract We review and elaborate on some aspects of Born-Infeld action and its supersymmetric generalizations in connection with string theory. Contents: BI action from string theory; some properties of bosonic D = 4 BI action; = 1 and = 2 supersymmetric BI actions with manifest linear D = 4 supersymmetry; four-derivativeN N terms in = 4 supersymmetric BI action; BI actions with ‘deformed’ supersymmetry from D-braneN actions; non-abelian generalization of BI action; derivative corrections to BI action in open superstring theory. arXiv:hep-th/9908105v5 11 Dec 1999 To appear in the Yuri Golfand memorial volume, ed. M. Shifman, World Scientific (2000) August 1999 ⋆ e-mail address:
[email protected] † Also at Lebedev Physics Institute, Moscow. 1. Introduction It is a pleasure for me to contribute to Yuri Golfand’s memorial volume. I met Yuri several times during his occasional visits of Lebedev Institute in the 80’s. Two of our discussions in 1985 I remember quite vividly. Golfand found appealing the interpretation of string theory as a theory of ‘quantized coordinates’, viewing it as a generalization of some old ideas of noncommuting coordinates. In what should be an early spring of 1985 he read our JETP Letter [1] which was a brief Russian version of our approach with Fradkin [2] to string theory effective action based on representation of generating functional for string amplitudes as Polyakov string path integral with a covariant 2-d sigma model in the exponent.