Fully Localized Brane Intersections - The Plot Thickens

Abstract

We study fully localized BPS brane solutions in classical supergravity using a perturbative approach to the coupled Born-Infeld/bulk supergravity system. We derive first order bulk supergravity fields for world-volume solitons corresponding to intersecting M2-branes and to a fundamental string ending on a D3-brane. One interesting feature is the appearance of certain off-diagonal metric components and corresponding components of the gauge potentials. Making use of a supersymmetric ansatz for the exact fields, we formulate a perturbative expansion which applies to $M2 \perp M2 (0), M5 \perp M5 (3)$ and $Dp \perp Dp (p-2)$ intersections. We find that perturbation theory qualitatively distinguishes between certain of these cases: perturbation theory breaks down at second order for intersecting M2-branes and D$p$-branes with $p\le 3$ while it is well behaved, at least to this order, for the remaining cases. This indicates that the behavior of the full non-linear intersecting Dp-brane solutions may be qualitatively different for $p \le 3$ than for $p \ge 4$, and that fully localized asymptotically flat solutions for $p \le 3$ may not exist. We discuss the consistency of these results with world-volume field theory properties.