Noncommutative Solitons

Solitonic objects play a central role in gauge and string theory (as, e.g., monopoles, black holes, D-branes, etc.). Certain string backgrounds produce a noncommutative deformation of the low-energy effective field theory, which allows for new types of solitonic solutions. I present the construction, moduli spaces and dynamics of Moyal-deformed solitons, exemplified in the 2+1 dimensional Yang-Mills-Higgs theory and its Bogomolny system, which is gauge-fixed to an integrable chiral sigma model (the Ward model). Noncommutative solitons for various 1+1 dimensional integrable systems (such as sine-Gordon) easily follow by dimensional and algebraic reduction. Supersymmetric extensions exist as well and are related to twistor string theory.