Cordes et D-branes dans les espaces-temps courbes

Abstract

This thesis is devoted to the construction and study of D-branes in some curved space-times in string theory. On the one hand, those D-branes are described geometrically as submanifolds subject to Born-Infeld effective dynamics. On the other hand, they can be built microscopically using boundary conformal field theory. We use and compare those two approaches. We also improve them technically : we rewrite Born-Infeld dynamics in a gauge-invariant way, and formulate precise analyticity requirements for the density of open strings on certain D-branes. Our results include the effective description of symmetric D-branes in compact groups, the determination of the complete spectrum of open strings on AdS2 D-branes in AdS3, the exact construction of some D-branes in the cigar SL(2)/U(1), and a geometric description of all D3-branes in NS5-brane backgrounds.