Near-horizon brane-scan revived

In 1987 two versions of the brane-scan of D-dimensional super p-branes were put forward. The first pinpointed those Q), D) 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 AdS(p+2) x SD-p-2. 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 (p = 2. D = 11), (p = 3. D = 10) and (p = 5. D = 11). Just recently. however. it has been argued (flat the fundamental D = 10 heterotic string does indeed display a near-horizon enhancement to OSp(8/2) as predicted by the brane-scan. provided alpha' corrections are taken into account. Of 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. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.