Magnetic Flux in Toroidal Type I Compactification

We discuss the compactification of type I strings on a torus with additional background gauge flux on the D9-branes. The solutions to the cancellation of the RR tadpoles display various phenomenologically attractive features: supersymmetry breaking, chiral fermions and the opportunity to reduce the rank of the gauge group as desired. We also point out the equivalence of the concept of various different background fields and noncommutative deformations of the geometry on the individual D9-branes by constructing the relevant boundary states to describe such objects.