Supercharges, Killing spinors and intersecting gauge five-branes Original Research Article

We obtain new solutions where a string and a pp-wave lie in the common world-volume directions of the non-standard intersection of two gauge 5-branes in the heterotic string. The two 5-branes are supported by independent SU(2) Yang–Mills instantons in their respective (non-overlapping) transverse spaces. We present a detailed study of the unbroken supersymmetry, focusing especially on a comparison between a direct construction of Killing spinors and a counting of zero eigenvalues in the anticommutator of supercharges. The results are in agreement with some previous arguments, to the effect that additional zero eigenvalues resulting from a “fine-tuning” between positive-energy and negative-energy contributions from different components in an intersection are spurious, and should not be taken as an indication of supersymmetry enhancements. These observations have a general applicability that goes beyond the specific example we study in this paper.