A Born-Infeld theory describing a D2-brane coupled to a 4-form RR field strength is considered, and the general solutions of the static and Euclidean time equations are derived and discussed. The period of the bounce solutions is shown to allow a consideration of tunneling and quantum-classical transitions in the sphaleron region. The order of such transitions, depending on the strength of the RR field strength, is determined. A criterion is then derived to confirm these findings.

The duality symmetries of various chiral boson actions are investigated using D=2 and D=6 space-time dimensions as examples. These actions involve the Siegel, Floreanini-Jackiw, Srivastava and Pasti-Sorokin-Tonin formulations. We discover that the Siegel, Floreanini-Jackiw and Pasti-Sorokin-Tonin actions have self-duality with respect to a common anti-dualization of chiral boson fields in D=2 and D56 dimensions, respectively, while the Srivastava action is self-dual with respect to a generalized dualization of chiral boson fields. Moreover, the action of the Floreanini-Jackiw chiral bosons interacting with gauge fields in D=2 dimensions also has self-duality but with respect to a generalized anti-dualization of chiral boson fields.

The self-duality of chiral p-forms was originally investigated by Pasti, Sorokin and Tonin in a manifestly Lorentz covariant action with non-polynomial auxiliary fields. The investigation was then extended to other chiral p-form actions. In this paper we point out that the self-duality appears in a wider context of theoretical models that relate to chiral p-forms. We demonstrate this by considering the interacting model of Floreanini-Jackiw chiral bosons and gauge fields, the generalized. chiral Schwinger model GCSM and the latter's gauge invariant formulation, and discover that the self-duality of the GCSM corresponds to the vector and axial vector current duality.

The effect of temperature is investigated in the Randall-Sundrum brane-world scenario. It is shown that for a spacetime ansatz motivated by similarity with AdS/CFT correspondence several features of the model, such as its Z2 symmetry, are not maintained at nonzero temperatures.

By using the systematic approach of parent action method, we derive one Weyl-noninvariant and two Weyl-invariant actions of bosonic p-branes (p, 2) starting from the Nambu-Goto action, and establish the duality symmetries in this set of four actions. Moreover, we discover a new bosonic p-brane action (including the string theory) and deduce two corresponding Weyl-invariant formulations by proposing a new special parent action. We find that the same duality symmetries as those mentioned above exist in this new set of actions. The new p-brane actions are also briefly analyzed.