Exotic Branes in M-Theory

Abstract

We revisit curious objects in string and M-theory called exotic branes—objects that are highly non-perturbative, possessing a tension that scales less than $g_s^{−2}$ and are generically of low-codimension. They are non-geometric in the sense that they are only well-defined locally as supergravity solutions and require duality transformations to patch correctly, in addition to the usual diffeomorphisms and gauge transformations. We argue that Double Field Theory (DFT) and Exceptional Field Theory (EFT) are the prime setting in which to examine such objects. To emphasise this, we construct an explicit solution in $E_{7(7)} \times \mathbb{R}^+$ EFT that unifies many of the codimension-2 exotic branes into a single well-behaved solution on an extended spacetime. We further argue that there are in fact an infinite number of exotic branes in string- and M-theory, many of which fall into a more general class of exotic branes that do not afford even a local description in terms of conventional supergravity.