Open strings in magnetic background fields (Q2747081)

This voluminous paper is based upon the author's Ph.D. thesis accomplished at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.NEWLINENEWLINE The author discusses in four chapters, each of which is subdivided into several sections, various aspects of internal magnetic background fields in open string theories. Various phenomenologically and conceptually interesting properties of such string background fields, supersymmetry, gauge symmetry breaking, chiral fermion spectra and noncommutativity of the internal compactification manifolds are discussed in a rather general, unifying framework.NEWLINENEWLINE After a motivating introduction, Chapter 2 deals with a general treatment of open strings, their D-branes, background fluxes, and toroidal compactifications of \(D\)-branes with background fluxes. In Chapter 3 this is used to study, in great detail, explicit compactifications of the so-called type I strings with background fluxes, including the concrete construction of type I vacua and a couple of illustrating examples.NEWLINENEWLINE Chapter 4 turns to type I superstrings with asymmetric symmetries. The author constructs type I vacua which are asymmetric orientifolds and exhibits a large class of \(N=1\) supersymmetric models in six and four dimensions with rather exotic internal geometry.NEWLINENEWLINE Several examples, throughout the paper, illustrate the amazing simplicity and the remarkable power of the author's approach to certain open strings.