Defect branes as Alice strings

TL;DR

This paper explores how defect branes in supergravity, resembling Alice strings, facilitate charge transfer processes that preserve charge conservation, revealing a novel interpretation of defect branes as string theory realizations of Alice strings.

Contribution

It demonstrates that defect branes can be viewed as Alice strings in string theory, providing a detailed analysis of charge transfer and constructing the resulting background with non-localized charge.

Findings

Charge transfer occurs via background transfer, preserving overall charge.

Defect branes exhibit monodromies similar to Alice strings.

Constructed backgrounds include non-localized charges without sources.

Abstract

There exist various defect-brane backgrounds in supergravity theories which arise as the low energy limit of string theories. These backgrounds typically have non-trivial monodromies, and if we move a charged probe around the center of a defect, its charge will be changed by the action of the monodromy. During the process, the charge conservation law seems to be violated. In this paper, to resolve this puzzle, we examine a dynamics of the charge changing process and show that the missing charge of the probe is transferred to the background. We then explicitly construct the resultant background after the charge transfer process by utilizing dualities. This background has the same monodromy as the original defect brane, but has an additional charge which does not have any localized source. In the literature, such a charge without localized source is known to appear in the presence of Alice strings. We argue that defect branes can in fact be regarded as a realization of Alice strings in string theory and examine the charge transfer process from that perspective.