Anti-de Sitter branes with Neveu-Schwarz and Ramond-Ramond backgrounds

We review some facts about AdS2xS2 branes in AdS3xS3 with a Neveu-Schwarz background, and consider the case of Ramond-Ramond backgrounds. We compute the spectrum of quadratic fluctuations in the low-energy approximation and discuss the open-string geometry.Comment: 8 pages, uses JHEP3.cl

(Half) a Lecture on D-branes

This is a concise foreword to, rather than a review of D-brane physics.Comment: 20 pages, Latex. To appear in Proceedings of the Workshop on Gauge Theories, Applied Supersymmetry and Quantum Gravity (Imperial College, London, July 1996). Two misprints in eqs. (3.24) and (3.25) correcte