-Branes Electric-Magnetic Duality and Stückelberg/Higgs Mechanism:
-branes interacting with
Maxwell fields of higher rank, using path-integral methods.
By Fourier transforming the field strength, we obtain a different representation
of the vacuum functional in terms of a ``magnetic'' gauge potential and a new
current. In order to test this procedure, we discuss first the case
of closed objects, and derive the familiar relationship between the
dimensionality of electric and magnetic -branes. We then generalize
the procedure to the case of open -branes. In this case,
the original gauge invariance is broken due to the presence of a
free boundary, but we show that the symmetry can be restored,
by introducing a compensating field into the theory.
This brings into the theory a dimensionful coupling constant which
ultimately leads, via the duality transformation,
to a gauge invariant generalized Higgs mechanism for generating mass.
-branes
