Spiky Strings and Spin Chains

TL;DR

This paper analyzes spiky string solutions in AdS space at large angular momentum, constructs multi-spike solutions, and demonstrates their spectral curves match those of dual gauge theory spin chains, confirming a key string-gauge correspondence.

Contribution

It provides explicit spectral curves for multi-spike strings and confirms their match with gauge theory spin chains, strengthening the AdS/CFT correspondence at the spectral level.

Findings

Spectral curves for large angular momentum spiky strings are derived.

Multi-spike solutions are constructed and analyzed.

Spectral data matches classical spin chain predictions.

Abstract

We determine spectral curves for the known spiky string solutions in AdS space in the limit of large angular momentum. We also construct generic multi-spike solutions in this limit and compute the corresponding spectral data. The resulting spectral curves precisely match those of the classical spin chain describing the dual operators in one-loop gauge theory. Our results confirm the map between string theory and gauge theory degrees of freedom proposed in arXiv:0805.4387 [hep-th].