The coupling of Yang-Mills to extended objects

Abstract The coupling of Yang-Mills fields to the heterotic string in bosonic formulation is generalized to extended objects of higher dimension (p-branes). For odd p, the Bianchi identities obeyed by the field strengths of the (p+1)-forms receive Chern-Simons corrections which, in the case of the five-brane, are consistent with an earlier conjecture based on string/five-brane duality.