Near-horizon brane-scan revived Original Research Article

In 1987 two versions of the brane-scan of D-dimensional super p-branes were put forward. The first pinpointed those image 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 image. 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 image, image and image. Just recently, however, it has been argued that the fundamental image heterotic string does indeed display a near-horizon enhancement to image as predicted by the brane-scan, provided image 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.