Fully localized brane intersections: The plot thickens - art. no. 024012

We study fully localized Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield brane solutions in classical supergravity using a perturbative approach to the coupled Born-In feld or bulk supergravity system. We derive first order bulk supergravity f ields for world-volume solitons corresponding to intersecting M2-branes and to a fundamental string ending on a D3-brane. One interesting feature is t he appearance of certain off-diagonal metric components and the correspondi ng components of the gauge potentials. Making use of a supersymmetric ansat z for the exact fields, we formulate a perturbative expansion which applies to M2 perpendicular to M2(0), M5 perpendicular to M5(3) and Dp perpendicul ar to Dp (p-2) intersections. We find that perturbation theory qualitativel y distinguishes between certain cases: perturbation theory breaks down at s econd order for intersecting M2-branes and Dp-branes with p less than or eq ual to 3 while it is well behaved, at least to this order, for the remainin g cases. This indicates that the behavior of the full nonlinear intersectin g Dp-brane solutions may be qualitatively different for p less than or equa l to 3 than for p greater than or equal to 4, and that fully localized asym ptotically flat solutions for p less than or equal to 3 may not exist. We d iscuss the consistency of these results with world-volume field theory prop erties.