Branes in String/M-Theory

Abstract This is a writeup of lectures delivered at the Asian Pacific Introductory School on Superstring and Related Topics in Beijing (2006) and an expanded version of these lectures given at the Third Summer School on Strings, Fields and Holography in Nanjing (2023). It aims to provide both a historical and pedagogical account of developments in finding 1/2 Bogomol'nyi–Prasad–Sommerfield (BPS) extended string solitons during the early stage of the so-called second string revolution, before which these objects were thought to be unrelated to strings. Non-supersymmetric solutions related to brane/anti brane systems or non-BPS systems are also discussed.