Noncommutative solitons

Though noncommutative field theories have been explored for several years, a resurgence of interest in it was sparked off after it was realised that they arise very naturally as limits of string theory in certain background fields. It became more plausible (at least to string theorists) that these nonlocal deformations of usual quantum field theories are consistent theories in themselves. This led to a detailed exploration of many of their classical and quantum properties. I will elaborate further on the string theory context in the next section. One of the consequences of this exploration was the discovery of novel classical solutions in noncommutative field theories. Since then much work has been done in exploring many of their novel properties. My lectures focussed on some specific aspects of these noncommutative solitons. They primarily reflect the topics that I have worked on and are not intended to be a survey of the large amount of work on this topic. We have tried to give a flavour of the physics that can be captured by the relatively elementary classical solutions of noncommutative field theories. We have seen in different contexts how these solitons are really simple manifestations of D-branes, possessing many of their important features. Though they have been primarily studied in the context of tachyon condensation, we saw that they can also shed some light on the resolution of singularities in spacetime by D-brane probes. In addition to other applications in string theory it is important at this stage to explore their presence in other systems with a strong magnetic field like the quantum hall effect