Bound states of strings and p-branes

The recent discovery of an explicit conformal field theory description of Type II p-branes makes it possible to investigate the existence of bound states of such objects. In particular, it is possible with reasonable precision to verify the prediction that the Type IIB superstring in ten dimensions has a family of soliton and bound state strings permuted by SL(2, ℤ). The space-time coordinates enter tantalizingly in the formalism as non-commuting matrices.