The thesis begins with an introduction to M-theory (at a graduate student's level), starting from perturbative string theory and proceeding to dualities, D-branes and finally Matrix theory. The following chapter treats, in a self-contained way, of general classical p-brane solutions. Black and extremal branes are reviewed, along with their semi-classical thermodynamics. We then focus on intersecting extremal branes, the intersection rules being derived both with and without the explicit use of supersymmetry. The last three chapters comprise more advanced aspects of brane physics, such as the dynamics of open branes, the little theories on the world-volume of branes and how the four dimensional Schwarzschild black hole can be mapped to an extremal configuration of branes, thus allowing for a statistical interpretation of its entropy. The original results were already reported in hep-th 9701042, hep-th 9704190, hep-th 9710027 and hep-th 9801053.
Supergravity solutions corresponding to D-branes at angles were found in @cite_31 @cite_59 @cite_178 . The resulting solutions contain as expected off-diagonal elements in the internal metric, and the derivation from the equations of motion as in @cite_59 is accordingly rather intricated.
@cite_31 @cite_178 @cite_59
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A low-energy background field solution is presented which describes several D-membranes oriented at angles with respect to one another. The mass and charge densities for this configuration are computed and found to saturate the Bogomol close_quote nyi-Prasad-Sommerfeld bound, implying the preservation of one-quarter of the supersymmetries. T duality is exploited to construct new solutions with nontrivial angles from the basic one. copyright ital 1997 ital The American Physical Society We construct the most general supersymmetric configuration of @math -branes and @math -branes on a 6-torus. It contains arbitrary numbers of branes at relative @math angles. The corresponding supergravity solutions are constructed and expressed in a remarkably simple form, using the complex geometry of the compact space. The spacetime supersymmetry of the configuration is verified explicitly, by solution of the Killing spinor equations, and the equations of motion are verified too. Our configurations can be interpreted as a 16-parameter family of regular extremal black holes in four dimensions. Their entropy is interpreted microscopically by counting the degeneracy of bound states of @math -branes. Our result agrees in detail with the prediction for the degeneracy of BPS states in terms of the quartic invariant of the E(7,7) duality group.