Abstract

We study fully localized Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield brane solutions in classical supergravity using a perturbative approach to the coupled Born-Infeld or bulk supergravity system. We derive first order bulk supergravity fields for world-volume solitons corresponding to intersecting M2-branes and to a fundamental string ending on a D3-brane. One interesting feature is the appearance of certain off-diagonal metric components and the corresponding components of the gauge potentials. Making use of a supersymmetric ansatz for the exact fields, we formulate a perturbative expansion which applies to M2?M2(0), M5?M5(3) and Dp?Dp (p-2) intersections. We find that perturbation theory qualitatively distinguishes between certain cases: perturbation theory breaks down at second order for intersecting M2-branes and Dp-branes with p ?3 while it is well behaved, at least to this order, for the remaining cases. This indicates that the behavior of the full nonlinear intersecting Dp-brane solutions may be qualitatively different for p?3 than for p?4, and that fully localized asymptotically flat solutions for p?3 may not exist. We discuss the consistency of these results with world-volume field theory properties. ©1999 The American Physical Society.