Solitons in the Horava-Witten supergravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates classical BPS five-brane solutions in Horava-Witten supergravity, revealing how the eleventh dimension influences these solutions and their physical properties, including mass, charge, and four-dimensional interpretations.

Contribution

It introduces new five-brane solutions in Horava-Witten supergravity that depend on the eleventh dimension and analyzes their physical characteristics and implications.

Findings

Presence of the eleventh dimension affects five-brane solutions.

Corrections to ten-dimensional solutions are significant near the brane center.

Computed mass and charge match quantization conditions.

Abstract

We study classical BPS five-brane solutions in the Horava-Witten supergravity. The presence of the eleventh dimension add a new feature, namely the dependence of the solution on this new coordinate. For gauge five-branes with an instanton size less than the eleventh radius and in the neighborhood of the center of the neutral five-brane, important corrections to the ten-dimensional solution appear for all values of the string coupling constant. We compute the mass and magnetic charge of the five-brane solitons and the result is shown to agree with the membrane and five-brane quantization conditions. Compactified to four dimensions, our solutions are interpreted as axionic strings.