Brane Surgery with Thom Classes

We propose a method to investigate the conservation of brane charges at the intersection of two or more branes using the Thom classes of their normal bundles. In particular we find a relation between the charge of the branes involved in the configuration and the charge of the defects on the branes due to the intersection. We also explore the applications of our method for various brane intersections in type II strings and M-theory.