ANOMALIES, BRANES, AND CURRENTS

When a D-brane wraps around a cycle of a curved manifold, the twisting of its normal bundle can induce chiral asymmetry in its world-volume theory. We obtain the general form of the resulting anomalies for D-br anes and their intersections. They are not cancelled among themselves, and the standard inflow mechanism does not apply at first sight becau se of their apparent lack of factorizability and the apparent vanishin g of the corresponding inflow. We show, however, that after taking int o consideration the effects of the non-trivial topology of the normal bundles, the anomalies can be transformed into factorized forms and pr ecisely cancelled by finite inflow from the Chern-Simons actions for t he D-branes as long as the latter are well defined. We then consider e xamples in type II compactifications where the twisting of the normal bundles occurs and calculate the changes in the induced Ramond-Ramond charges on the D-branes. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.