Exotic Branes and Nonperturbative Seven Branes

TL;DR

This paper constructs the effective action for exotic branes in Type II string theories, focusing on the NS-7B brane, revealing its non-local charge structure and its transformation properties under SL(2,Z), which are not predicted by standard supersymmetry algebra.

Contribution

The paper provides the first explicit effective action for the NS-7B exotic brane and clarifies its relation to other branes via dualities and coordinate transformations, extending understanding of nonperturbative branes.

Findings

NS-7B brane carries a non-local charge related to duals of axion and dilaton.

The effective action confirms the SL(2,Z) triplet structure with the D7-brane.

The brane's existence is not predicted by the standard supersymmetry algebra, but can be understood via dualities and coordinate choices.

Abstract

We construct the effective action of certain exotic branes in the Type II theories which are not predicted by their spacetime supersymmetry algebras. We analyze in detail the case of the NS-7B brane, S-dual to the D7-brane, and connected by T-duality to other exotic branes in Type IIA: the KK-6A brane and the KK-8A brane (obtained by reduction of the M-theory Kaluza-Klein monopole and M9-brane, respectively). The NS-7B brane carries charge with respect to the S-dual of the RR 8-form, which we identify as a non-local combination of the electric-magnetic duals of the axion and the dilaton. The study of its effective action agrees with previous results in the literature showing that it transforms as an SL(2,Z) triplet together with the D7-brane. We discuss why this brane is not predicted by the Type IIB spacetime supersymmetry algebra. In particular we show that the modular transformation relating the D7 and NS-7B brane solutions can be undone by a simple coordinate transformation in the two dimensional transverse space, equivalent to choosing a different region to parametrize the SL(2,Z) moduli space. We discuss a similar relation between the D6 and KK-6A branes and the D8 and KK-8A branes.