Cohomological analysis of bosonic D-strings and 2d sigma models coupled to abelian gauge fields

We analyze completely the BRST cohomology on local functionals for two-dimensional sigma models coupled to abelian world-sheet gauge fields, including effective bosonic D-string models described by Born-Infeld actions. In particular we prove that the rigid symmetries of such models are exhausted by the solutions to generalized Killing vector equations which we have presented recently, and provide all the consistent first order deformations and candidate gauge anomalies of the models under study. For appropriate target space geometries we find nontrivial deformations both of the abelian gauge transformations and of the world-sheet diffeomorphisms, and antifield-dependent candidate anomalies for both types of symmetries separately, as well as mixed ones. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.