Strings and D-branes in a supersymmetric magnetic flux background

Abstract

We investigate how the presence of RR magnetic $F_{p+2}$ fluxes affects the energy of classical Dp branes, for specific string theory supersymmetric backgrounds which are solutions to the leading order in $\alpha'$ including back-reaction effects. The Dp brane dynamics is found to be similar to the well known dynamics of particles and strings moving in magnetic fields. We find a class of BPS solutions which generalize the BPS fundamental strings or BPS branes with momentum and winding to the case of non-zero magnetic fields. Remarkably, the interaction with the magnetic fields does not spoil the supersymmetry of the solution, which turns out to be invariant under four supersymmetry transformations. We find that magnetic fields can significantly reduce the energy of some BPS strings and Dp branes, in particular, some macroscopic Dp branes become light for sufficiently large magnetic fields.