Introductory Lectures on D-Branes

I. V. Vancea

Published 2001-09-04, updated 2001-09-13Version 2

This is a pedagogical introduction to D-branes, addressed to graduate students in field theory and particle physics and to other beginners in string theory. I am not going to review the most recent results since there are already many good papers on web devoted to that. Instead, I will present some old techniques in some detail in order to show how some basic properties of strinfs and branes as the massless spectrum of string, the effective action of D-branes and their tension can be computed using QFT techniques. Also, I will present shortly the boundary state description of D-branes. The details are exposed for bosonic branes since I do not assume any previous knowledge of supersymmetry which is not a requirement for this school. However, for completeness and to provide basic notions for other lectures, I will discuss some properties of supersymemtric branes. The present lectures were delivered at Jorge Andr\'{e} Swieca School on Particle and Fields, 2001, Campos do Jord\~{a}o, Brazil.