# The two faces of T-branes

## TL;DR

This paper establishes a duality between complex non-Abelian T-brane configurations and simpler Abelian D-brane systems, enabling more reliable descriptions of T-branes in certain regimes.

## Contribution

It introduces a brane-brane duality linking T-branes to Abelian D-branes and confirms this by matching physical quantities and analyzing the Dirac-Born-Infeld action.

## Key findings

- Duality between T-branes and Abelian D-branes established.
- Energy densities and electromagnetic couplings match on both sides.
- Non-Abelian Dirac-Born-Infeld action factorization verified.

## Abstract

We establish a brane-brane duality connecting T-branes to collections of ordinary D-branes. T-branes are intrinsically non-Abelian brane configurations with worldvolume flux, whereas their duals consist of Abelian brane systems that encode the T-brane data in their curvature. We argue that the new Abelian picture provides a reliable description of T-branes when their non-Abelian fields have large expectation values in string units. To confirm this duality, we match the energy density and all the electromagnetic couplings on both sides. A key step in this derivation is a non-trivial factorization of the symmetrized-trace non-Abelian Dirac-Born-Infeld action when evaluated on solutions of the $\alpha'$-corrected Hitchin system.