SCALAR ABSORPTION AND THE BREAKING OF THE WORLD-VOLUME CONFORMAL-INVARIANCE

We investigate a version of fixed scalars for nondilatonic branes whic h correspond to dilatations of the brane world-volume. We obtain a cro ss section whose world-volume interpretation falls out naturally from an investigation of the breaking of conformal invariance by the irrele vant Born-Infeld corrections to Yang-Mills theory. From the same irrel evant world-volume operator we obtain the leading correction to the cr oss sections of minimal scalars. This correction can be obtained in su pergravity via an improved matching of inner and outer solutions to th e minimal wave equation. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.