Brane dynamics in background fluxes and non-commutative geometry

Branes in non-trivial backgrounds are expected to exhibit interesting dynamical properties. We use the boundary conformal field theory approach to study branes in a curved background with non-vanishing Neveu-Schwarz 3-form field strength. For branes on an S3, the low-energy effective action is computed to leading order in the string tension. It turns out to be a field theory on a non-commutative 'fuzzy 2-sphere' which consists of a Yang-Mills and a Chern-Simons term. We find a certain set of classical solutions that have no analogue for flat branes in Euclidean space. These solutions show, in particular, how a spherical brane can arise as bound state from a stack of D0-branes. (author)