Flux Stabilization of D-branes

Abstract

We explain how D-branes on group manifolds are stabilized against shrinking by quantized worldvolume U(1) fluxes. Starting from the Born-Infeld action in the case of the SU(2) group manifold we derive the masses, multiplicities and spectrum of small fluctuations of these branes, and show that they agree exactly with the predictions of Conformal Field Theory, to all orders in the α ′ expansion. We discuss the generalization to other groups and comment on an apparent paradox: why are the 'RR charges' of these branes not quantized?

Matrix dynamics of fuzzy spheres

“…It has already been shown in [6]that these results agree with the Born-Infeld results in the region (5.5).…”

“…In section 5, we relate our method with other approaches. We first compare our results with the spherical D2 brane of Bachas, Douglas and Schweigert [6]. We also discuss Myers' dual D2 brane [4].…”

“…Noncommutative spheres have made their appearance in string theory for a variety of reasons [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]15,16]. Apart from their intrinsic interest [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], non-commutative spaces could actually be a more realistic description of space-time at very short length scales [23,24].…”

Lumps in the throat

“…These D3 branes do not slip out of the three-cycle because of the stabilising RR background fluxes that, via the underlying Myers effect [22], are responsible for the existence of stable defects in our spacetime [23,16]. A more detailed construction to show how wrapped D-branes do not shrink to a zero-cycle when wrapped on non-topological cycles is given in [24].…”

Non-abelian (p,q) strings in the warped deformed conifold

“…Since this S 2 is thus magnetized, it suggests that on the non-Abelian side we should attempt to describe this wrapped S 2 via a fuzzy sphere ansatz for our transverse scalars, as we know that in the large q limit we should recover the classical two-sphere geometry with q units of magnetic flux. This is not the same as constructing the dual model to that in [12], as in order to do so we would have to consider a BIon type solution [21] which blows up into a D3-brane wrapped on the two-cycle via the dielectric effect [14,20]. The non-trivial construction of such a solution is beyond the scope of this note, but would be useful to develop in the future.…”