English

Macroscopic (and Microscopic) Massless Modes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-03-11 v2

Abstract

We study certain spinning strings exploring the flat directions of AdS3 x S3 x S3 x S1, the massless sector cousins of su(2) and sl(2) sector spinning strings. We describe these, and their vibrational modes, using the D(2,1;\alpha)^2 algebraic curve. By exploiting a discrete symmetry of this structure which reverses the direction of motion on the spheres, and alters the masses of the fermionic modes s \to 1-s, we find out how to treat the massless fermions which were previously missing from this formalism. We show that folded strings behave as a special case of circular strings, in a sense which includes their mode frequencies, and we are able to recover this fact in the worldsheet formalism. We use these frequencies to calculate one-loop corrections to the energy, with a version of the Beisert-Tseytlin resummation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1412.6380,
  title  = {Macroscopic (and Microscopic) Massless Modes},
  author = {Michael C. Abbott and Inês Aniceto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6380},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

32 pages, 2 figures. v2 corrects equation (64) and our normalisation of mass, and matches the published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T07:38:11.550Z