Unified dark matter/energy models (quartessence) based upon the Chaplygin gas D-brane fail owing to the suppression of structure formation by the adiabatic speed of sound. Including string theory effects, in particular the Kalb-Ramond field which becomes massive via the brane, we show how nonadiabatic perturbations allow successful structure formation.
A new mechanism, valid for any smooth version of the Randall-Sundrum model, of getting localized massless vector field on the brane is described here. This is obtained by dimensional reduction of a five dimension massive two form, or Kalb-Ramond field, giving a Kalb-Ramond and an emergent vector field in four dimensions. A geometrical coupling with the Ricci scalar is proposed and the coupling constant is fixed such that the components of the fields are localized. The solution is obtained by decomposing the fields in transversal and longitudinal parts and showing that this give decoupled equations of motion for the transverse vector and KR fields in four dimensions. We also prove some identities satisfied by the transverse components of the fields. With this is possible to fix the coupling constant in a way that a localized zero mode for both components on the brane is obtained. Then, all the above results are generalized to the massive $p-$form field. It is also shown that in general an effective $p$ and $(p-1)-$forms can not be localized on the brane and we have to sort one of them to localize. Therefore, we can not have a vector and a scalar field localized by dimensional reduction of the five dimensional vector field. In fact we find the expression $p=(d-1)/2$ which determines what forms will give rise to both fields localized. For $D=5$, as expected, this is valid only for the KR field.
We present here a manifestly gauge invariant calculation of vacuum polarization to fermions in the presence of a constant Maxwell and a constant Kalb-Ramond field in four dimensions. The formalism is a generalisation of the one used by Schwinger in his famous paper on gauge invariance and vacuum polarization. We get an explicit expression for the vacuum polarization induced effective Lagrangian for a constant Maxwell field interacting with a constant Kalb-Ramond field. In the weak field limit we get the coupling between the Maxwell field and the Kalb-Ramond field to be $(tilde{H}.tilde{F})^2$, where ${tilde H}_{mu}= {1over {3!}}epsilon_{mualphabetalambda}H^{alphabetalambda}$ and $tilde F$ is the dual of $F_{mu u}$.
We investigate gauge/gravity duals with flavour for which pure-gauge Kalb-Ramond B fields are turned on in the background, into which a D7 brane probe is embedded. First we consider the case of a magnetic field in two of the spatial boundary directions. We show that at finite temperature, i.e. in the AdS-Schwarzschild background, the B field has a stabilizing effect on the mesons and chiral symmetry breaking occurs for a sufficiently large value of the B field. Then we turn to the electric case of a B field in the temporal direction and one spatial boundary direction. In this case, there is a singular region in which it is necessary to turn on a gauge field on the brane in order to ensure reality of the brane action. We find that the brane embeddings are attracted towards this region. Far away from this region, in the weak field case at zero temperature, we investigate the meson spectrum and find a mass shift similar to the Stark effect.
We show that the rank reduction of the gauge group on orientifolds in presence of non vanishing discrete Kalb-Ramond field can be explained by the presence of an induced field strength in a non trivial bundle on the branes. This field strength is also necessary for the tadpole cancellation and the number of branes is left unchanged by the presence of the discrete Kalb-Ramond background.
We present the general form of the operators that lift the group action on the twisted sectors of a bosonic string on an orbifold ${cal M}/G$, in the presence of a Kalb-Ramond field strength $H$. These operators turn out to generate the quasi-quantum group $D_{omega}[G]$, introduced in the context of orbifold conformal field theory by R. Dijkgraaf, V. Pasquier and P. Roche. The 3-cocycle $omega$ entering in the definition of $D_{omega}[G]$ is related to $H$ by a series of cohomological equations in a tricomplex combining de Rham, Cech and group coboundaries. We construct magnetic amplitudes for the twisted sectors and show that $omega=1$ arises as a consistency condition for the orbifold theory. Finally, we recover discrete torsion as an ambiguity in the lift of the group action to twisted sectors, in accordance with previous results presented by E. Sharpe.