Dirac-Born-Infeld action from inequivalent representations of open strings

Abstract: We study open strings in a constant magnetic field from the viewpoint of universal canonical variables. Using a conserved Klein-Gordon-type pairing, we show that the canonical commutation relations remain background independent in the distributional sense, while the background dependence is encoded in the mode representation. The Bogoliubov transformation between different magnetic backgrounds is not unitarily implementable, so that the corresponding Fock representations are inequivalent. Nevertheless, the transformation determines the relative normalization of the vacua. We show that the resulting relative vacuum normalization precisely reproduces the relative boundary $g$-function, or equivalently the magnetic-field-dependent part of the disk amplitude, and yields the Dirac-Born-Infeld factor. Thus the disk normalization is encoded directly in the transformation between inequivalent representations of universal open-string variables.