2008/04/30 by M. J. Duff
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2008.11.001
published as Nucl.Phys.B810:193-209,2009 · Version appearing in Nucl. Phys. B, including the near-horizon brane-scans for both heterotic and M/Type II toroidal compactifications
openalex publication_date 2008/11/09 · arxiv created 2008/11/27 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02
In 1987 two versions of the brane-scan of D-dimensional super p-branes were put forward. The first pinpointed those (p,D) slots consistent with kappa-symmetric Green–Schwarz type actions; the second generalized the membrane at the end of the universe idea to all those superconformal groups describing p-branes on the boundary of AdSp+2×SD−p−2. Although the second version predicted D3- and M5-branes in addition to those of the first, it came unstuck because the 1/2 BPS solitonic branes failed to exhibit the required symmetry enhancement in the near-horizon limit, except in the non-dilatonic cases (p=2,D=11), (p=3,D=10) and (p=5,D=11). Just recently, however, it has been argued that the fundamental D=10 heterotic string does indeed display a near-horizon enhancement to OSp(8|2) as predicted by the brane-scan, provided α′ corrections are taken into account. If this logic could be extended to the other strings and branes, it would resolve this 21-year-old paradox and provide a wealth of new AdS/CFT dualities, which we tabulate.