Essentials of classical brane dynamics (Q1597489)

The author provides a comprehensive overview of the geometry and dynamics of relativistic brane models, of the category that includes point particles, strings, and membrane representations for phenomena that can be considered as being confined to a world-sheet of the corresponding dimension in a thin limit approximation in an ordinary 4-dimensional spacetime background. It is demonstrated that the geometry of a brane worldsheet of arbitrary dimension is describable in terms of the first, second, and third fundamental tensor. It is shown that to lowest order in the thin limit, the evolution of brane worldsheets will always be governed by a special tensor equation of motion.