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Gravitational background of Alice vortices and R7-branes

Atakan Çavuşoğlu1,*, Mirjam Cvetič1,2,3,†, Jonathan J. Heckman1,2,‡, Jeffrey Kuntz1,§, and Chitraang Murdia1,∥

  • *Contact author: atakanc@sas.upenn.edu
  • †Contact author: cvetic@physics.upenn.edu
  • ‡Contact author: jheckman@sas.upenn.edu
  • §Contact author: kuntzj@sas.upenn.edu
  • ∥Contact author: murdia@sas.upenn.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 026031 – Published 23 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/scv8-1gj8

Abstract

Codimension-two vortex solutions are important solitonic objects in both quantum field theory and gravity. In this paper, we construct a class of codimension-two Alice-vortex solutions in axio-dilaton gravity, in which monodromy around the vortex enacts the axion transformation C0↦−C0. In IIB supergravity, this furnishes a class of R7-brane backgrounds of the sort predicted by the swampland cobordism conjecture. Such configurations generically carry an intrinsic dipole moment. We extract additional properties of such branes from scattering probes. These results provide further evidence that the world-volume theory of an R7-brane is an eight-dimensional nonsupersymmetric interacting quantum field theory.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 026031– Published 23 July, 2026
  • Received 19 April 2026
  • Accepted 29 May 2026
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