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

Abstract

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.