Brane-like States in Superstring Theory and the Dynamics of non-Abelian Gauge Theories

We propose a string-theoretic ansatz describing the dynamics of SU(N) Yang-Mills theories in the limit of large N in D=4. The construction uses in a crucial way open-string vertex operators that describe non-perturbative brane dynamics. According to our proposal, various gauge theories are described by string theories with the same action, but with different measures in the functional integral. The choice of measure defines the gauge group, as well as the effective space-time dimension of the resulting gauge theory.