Fermi Coordinates and Penrose Limits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a covariant, physically intuitive formulation of the Penrose limit using null Fermi coordinates, enabling detailed analysis of higher order corrections and their implications in string theory.

Contribution

It develops a covariant, Fermi coordinate-based framework for the Penrose limit, extending previous descriptions and analyzing higher order corrections in various spacetime backgrounds.

Findings

First-order corrected metric admits a light-cone gauge in string theory.

Established a Weyl tensor peeling theorem analogue for Penrose expansion.

Derived leading quadratic corrections for AdS_5 x S^5.

Abstract

We propose a formulation of the Penrose plane wave limit in terms of null Fermi coordinates. This provides a physically intuitive (Fermi coordinates are direct measures of geodesic distance in space-time) and manifestly covariant description of the expansion around the plane wave metric in terms of components of the curvature tensor of the original metric, and generalises the covariant description of the lowest order Penrose limit metric itself, obtained in hep-th/0312029. We describe in some detail the construction of null Fermi coordinates and the corresponding expansion of the metric, and then study various aspects of the higher order corrections to the Penrose limit. In particular, we observe that in general the first-order corrected metric is such that it admits a light-cone gauge description in string theory. We also establish a formal analogue of the Weyl tensor peeling theorem for the Penrose limit expansion in any dimension, and we give a simple derivation of the leading (quadratic) corrections to the Penrose limit of AdS_5 x S^5.