The gauge invariance of the non-Abelian Chern–Simons action for D-branes revisited

Abstract

We present an elegant method to prove the invariance of the Chern–Simons part of the non-Abelian action for N coinciding D-branes under the R–R and NS–NS gauge transformations, by carefully defining what is meant by a background gauge transformation in the non-Abelian world volume action. We study as well the invariance under massive gauge transformations of the massive Type IIA supergravity and show that no massive dielectric couplings are necessary to achieve this invariance. We show that this result is consistent with (massive) T-duality from the non-Abelian action for N D9-branes.