On the Orientifolding of Type II NS-Fivebranes

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the existence of orientifolded NS-branes in type II string theory by explicitly verifying their symmetry properties, supporting their role in dualities involving orthogonal and symplectic gauge groups.

Contribution

It provides a direct verification of the assumed features of orientifolded NS-branes, showing they are consistent with world-sheet and space-time symmetries and can be described as exact conformal field theories.

Findings

Orientifolded NS-branes can exist in type II string theory.

They are invariant under specific symmetry combinations.

They can be described using background fields and as exact conformal field theories.

Abstract

Dualities between certain supersymmetric gauge field theories in three and four dimensions have been studied in considerable detail recently, by realizing them as geometric manipulations of configurations of extended objects in type II string theory. These extended objects include `D-branes' and `NS-(five)branes'. In constructing the brane configurations which realize dualities for orthogonal and symplectic gauge groups, an `orientifold' was introduced, which results in non-orientable string sectors. Certain features of orientifolded NS-branes -such as their existence- were assumed in the original construction, which have not been verified directly. However, those features fit very well together with the properties of the relevant field theories, and subsequently yielded the known dualities. This letter describes how orientifolded NS-branes can exist in type II string theory by displaying explicitly that the assumed combinations of world-sheet and space-time symmetries do indeed leave the NS-brane invariant and therefore can be gauged. The resulting orientifolded NS-brane can be described in terms of background fields, and furthermore as an exact conformal field theory, to exactly the same extent as the standard NS-brane.