The low-energy limit of AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$ and its TBA

TL;DR

This paper explores the low-energy spectrum of string excitations in AdS3/CFT2, constructing a TBA to incorporate massless modes and determining the associated low-energy conformal field theory with central charge 6.

Contribution

It introduces a TBA framework for massless modes in AdS3, revealing the low-energy CFT structure and calculating its central charge and excited state energies.

Findings

The low-energy spectrum is governed by massless relativistic S matrices.

The low-energy theory is a CFT2 with central charge c=6.

Vacuum energy calculations confirm supersymmetry and match CFT expectations.

Abstract

We investigate low-energy string excitations in AdS$_3\times$S$^3\times$T$^4$. When the worldsheet is decompactified, the theory has gapless modes whose spectrum at low energies is determined by massless relativistic integrable S matrices of the type introduced by Al. B. Zamolodchikov. The S matrices are non-trivial only for excitations with identical worldsheet chirality, indicating that the low-energy theory is a CFT$_2$. We construct a Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz (TBA) for these excitations and show how the massless modes' wrapping effects may be incorporated into the AdS$_3$ spectral problem. Using the TBA and its associated Y-system, we determine the central charge of the low energy CFT$_2$ to be $c=6$ from calculating the vacuum energy for antiperiodic fermions - with the vacuum energy being zero for periodic fermions in agreement with a supersymmetric theory - and find the energies of some excited states.