U-duality p-branes in diverse dimensions Original Research Article

U-duality p-branes in toroidally compactified type II superstring theories in space-time dimensions 10 > D ⩾ 4 can be constructed explicitly based on the conjectured U-duality symmetries and the corresponding known single-charge super-p-brane configurations. As concrete examples, we first construct explicitly the SL(3, Z) superstrings and SL(3, Z) × SL(2, Z) 0-branes as well as their corresponding magnetic duals in D = 8. For the SL(3, Z) superstrings (3-branes), each of them is characterized by a triplet of integers corresponding to the electric-like (magnetic-like) charges associated with the three 2-form gauge potentials present in the theory. For the SL(3, Z) × SL(2, Z) 0-branes (4-branes), each of them is labelled by a pair of triplets of integers corresponding to the electric-like (magnetic-like) charges associated with the two sets of three 1-form gauge potentials. The string (3-brane) tension and central charge are shown to be given by SL(3, Z)-invariant expressions. It is argued that when any two of the three integers in the integral triplet are relatively prime to each other, the corresponding string (3-brane) is stable and does not decay into multiple strings (3-branes) by a ‘tension gap’ or ‘charge gap’ equation. Similar results hold also for the 0-branes (4-branes). Along with the SL(2, Z) dyonic membranes of Izquierdo et al., these examples provide a further support for the conjectured SL(3, Z) × SL(2, Z)U-duality symmetry in this theory. Moreover, the study of these examples along with the previous ones provides us a recipe for constructing the U-duality p-branes of various supergravity theories in diverse dimensions. Constructions for these U-duality p-branes are also given.