Membranes from Five-Branes and Fundamental Strings from Dp Branes

TL;DR

This paper explores how M2 branes and fundamental strings can be understood as topological solitons and confined fluxes arising from brane-antibrane annihilations in string and M-theory frameworks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel topological soliton model for M2 branes and explains the formation of fundamental strings from Dp-brane pairs, addressing a recent theoretical puzzle.

Findings

M2 brane as a topological soliton on M5-anti-M5 pair

D4-anti-D4 pair annihilation produces fundamental strings

Confinement of U(1) gauge flux explains string formation

Abstract

We argue that M2 brane is realized as a topological soliton on a coincident pair of M5 and anti-M5 branes, as the two five-branes annihilate each other. Topology and quantum numbers of this world-volume soliton are discussed in some detail, and its formation is explained qualitatively. It follows from a compactification that a D4-anti-D4 pair annihilate and produce type II fundamental strings. The phenomenon is best described as the confinement of a world-volume U(1) gauge field on D4-anti-D4, where the confined electric flux string is identified as the fundamental string. This generalizes to other D$p$-anti-D$p$ systems, and solves a puzzle recently pointed out by Witten.