5 World Volume Solitons: Applications
There are two natural sets of applications involving brane effective actions: kinematical and
dynamical. In this section, I will discuss the application of the general formalism developed in
Section 4 to study the existence of certain string theory BPS states realised as world volume
supersymmetric bosonic solitons, leaving more AdS/CFT dynamically-oriented applications to
Section 6.
The main goals in this section include:
- In a Minkowski background, the identification of the vacuum of all the
dimensional
supersymmetric field theories discussed before as half-BPS flat infinite branes, and the
discussions of some of their excitations carrying topological charges, which are interpretable as
brane intersections or branes within branes.
- Supertubes, as examples of supersymmetric bound states realised as expanded branes without
carrying charge under the gauge potential, which the world volume brane minimally couples
to.
- As examples of solitons in curved backgrounds, I will discuss the baryon vertex and giant
gravitons in AdS5 × S5.
- I will stress the relevance of supertubes and giant gravitons as constituents of small
supersymmetric black holes, their connection to fuzzball ideas and the general use of probe
techniques to identify black hole constituents in more general situations.