Five-brane configurations without a strong coupling regime

Five-brane distributions with no strong-coupling problems and high symmetry are studied. The simplest configuration corresponds to a spherical shell of branes with S³ geometry and symmetry. The equations of motion with δ-function sources are carefully solved in such backgrounds. Various other brane distributions with sixteen unbroken supercharges are described. They are associated to exact world-sheet superconformal field theories with domain-walls in space-time. We study the equations of gravitational fluctuations, find normalizable modes of bulk six-dimensional gravitons and confirm the existence of a mass gap. We also study the moduli of the configurations and derive their (normalizable) wave functions. We use our results and holography to calculate, in a controllable fashion, the two-point function of the stress tensor of little string theory in these vacua.