Spacetime-Filling Branes and Strings with Sixteen Supercharges

TL;DR

This paper explores spacetime-filling branes in string theory, constructing their actions via dualities, and demonstrating their role in building theories with sixteen supercharges through modding and duality relations.

Contribution

It introduces the worldvolume actions of spacetime-filling branes and shows how they are used to construct supercharge-preserving string theories via dualities and orbifolds.

Findings

Constructed worldvolume actions for spacetime-filling branes.

Connected these branes to theories with sixteen supercharges.

Related different constructions through dualities and limits of the Horava-Witten model.

Abstract

We discuss branes whose worldvolume dimension equals the target spacetime dimension, i.e. ``spacetime-filling branes''. In addition to the D9-branes, there are 9-branes in the NS-NS sectors of both the IIA and IIB strings. The worldvolume actions of these branes are constructed, via duality, from the known actions of branes with codimension larger than zero. Each of these types of branes is used in the construction of a string theory with sixteen supercharges by modding out a type II string by an appropriate discrete symmetry and adding 32 9-branes. These constructions are related by a web of dualities and each arises as a different limit of the Horava-Witten construction.