Branes as BIons

A BIon may be defined as a finite energy solution of a nonlinear field theory with distributional sources. In contrast, a soliton is usually defined to have no sources. I show how harmonic coordinates map the exteriors of the topologically and causally non-trivial spacetimes of extreme p-branes to BIonic solutions of the Einstein equations in a topologically trivial spacetime in which the combined gravitational and matter energy-momentum is located on distributional sources. As a consequence the tension of BPS p-branes is classically unrenormalized. The result holds equally for spacetimes with singularities and for those, like the M-5-brane, which are everywhere singularity free.