Confinement on the brane

A non-perturbative confinement mechanism has been proposed to explain the f ate of the unbroken gauge group on the worldvolume of annihilating D-brane- anti-D-brane pairs. In this paper, we examine this phenomenon closely from several different perspectives. Existence of the confinement mechanism is m ost easily seen by noticing that the fundamental string emerges as the conf ined electric flux string at the end of the annihilation process. After rev iewing the confinement proposal in general, this is shown explicitly in the D2-anti-D2 case in the M-theory limit, Finally, we address the crucial iss ue of whether and how confinement occurs in the weakly coupled limit of str ing theory. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.