Giant Spinons

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 'large-winding' limit in AdS/CFT duality, revealing 'spinon' excitations as infinite sets of spiky strings and explaining their scattering behavior through factorized magnon interactions.

Contribution

It identifies and characterizes spinon excitations in gauge and string theories under a new large-winding limit, linking them to known string solutions and scattering phenomena.

Findings

Spinons are identified as infinite sets of spiky strings.

The large-winding limit leads to a new understanding of scattering phases.

Spinon scattering can be described as factorized magnon scatterings.

Abstract

We study the spectrum around the "antiferromagnetic" states of the planar AdS_5/CFT_4 duality. In contrast to the familiar large-spin limit J \to \infty where each magnon momentum scales as p \sim 1/J << 1, we consider a novel "large-winding" limit in which the total momentum becomes infinitely large, \sum_j p_j \to \infty. Upon taking the limit we identify "spinon" excitations of both gauge and string theories. In particular, a (classical) string spinon turns out to be an infinite set of spiky strings, which are closely related to well-known infinite-spin strings: giant magnons. Furthermore, we show that the curious agreement of scattering phase-shifts of two spikes and that of two giant magnons can be accounted for by regarding the spinon scattering as factorised scatterings of infinitely many magnons.