Open string - string junction transitions Original Research Article

It is confirmed that geodesic string junctions are necessary to describe the gauge vectors of symmetry groups that arise in the context of 1113 superstrings compactified in the presence of nonlocal 7-branes. By examining the moduli space of 7-brane backgrounds for which the dilaton and axion fields are constant, we are able to describe explicitly and geometrically how open string geodesics can fail to be smooth, and how geodesic string junctions then become the relevant BPS representatives of the gauge bosons. The mechanisms that guarantee the existence and uniqueness of the BPS representative of any gauge vector are also shown to generalize to the case where the dilaton and axion fields are not constant.