Brane Boxes, Anomalies, Bending and Tadpoles

Certain classes of chiral four-dimensional gauge theories may be obtained as the worldvolume theories of D5-branes suspended between networks of NS5-branes, the so-called brane box models. In this paper, we derive the stringy consistency conditions placed on these models, and show that they are equivalent to anomaly cancellation of the gauge theories. We derive these conditions in the orbifold theories which are T-dual to the elliptic brane box models. Specifically, we show that the expression for tadpoles for unphysical twisted RamondRamond 4-form fields in the orbifold theory are proportional to the gauge anomalies of the brane box theory. Thus string consistency is equivalent to worldvolume gauge anomaly cancellation. Furthermore, there are tadpoles for physical modes which we relate to the gauge β-functions of the gauge theory. e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected]