Enhançons, fuzzy spheres, and multimonopoles

We study the “enhançon,” a spherical hypersurface apparently made of D-branes, which arises in string theory studies of large N SU(N) pure gauge theories with eight supercharges. When the gauge theory is 2+1 dimensional, the enhançon is an S². A relation to charge N BPS multimonopoles is exploited to uncover many of its detailed properties. It is simply a spherical slice through an Atiyah-Hitchin-like submanifold of the charge N BPS monopole moduli space. In the form of Nahm data, it is built from the N dimensional irreducible representation of SU(2). In this sense the enhançon is a non-commutative sphere, reminiscent of the spherical “dielectric” branes of Myers.