The two faces of T-branes

Understand

We establish a brane-brane duality connecting T-branes to collections of ordinary D-branes.

• T-branes are intrinsically non-Abelian brane configurations with worldvolume flux, whereas their duals consist of Abelian brane systems that encode the T-brane data in their curvature.
• We argue that the new Abelian picture provides a reliable description of T-branes when their non-Abelian fields have large expectation values in string units.
• To confirm this duality, we match the energy density and all the electromagnetic couplings on both sides.