Superbranes and super Born-Infeld theories as nonlinear realizations

We use a few instructive examples to outline the characteristic features of the approach to superbranes and super Born-Infeld theories based on the concept of partial spontaneous breaking of global supersymmetry (PBGS). The examples include the N=1, D=4 supermembrane and the space-filling D2- and D3-branes. In addition to a short account of the available results for these systems, we present some new developments. For the supermembrane, we prove that the equation of motion following from the off-shell Goldstone superfield action is equivalent to the one derived directly from the nonlinear-realization formalism. We use a universal procedure inspired by the relation between linear and nonlinear realizations of the PBGS to obtain a new derivation of the off-shell Goldstone superfield actions for these systems.