A New Class of Exact Solutions in String Theory

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a broad class of string solutions, including plane-waves and fundamental strings, are exact to all orders in ' and connects these solutions to black holes via dimensional reduction.

Contribution

It introduces a new class of exact string solutions with null symmetry and chiral coupling, extending previous solutions and linking them to black hole solutions.

Findings

Large class of solutions are exact to all orders in '

Solutions include traveling waves and black holes with NUT charge and rotation

Bosonic solutions are also valid in heterotic string theory without extra gauge fields

Abstract

We prove that a large class of leading order string solutions which generalize both the plane-wave and fundamental string backgrounds are, in fact, exact solutions to all orders in \alpha'. These include, in particular, the traveling waves along the fundamental string. The key features of these solutions are a null symmetry and a chiral coupling of the string to the background. Using dimensional reduction, one finds that the extremal electric dilatonic black holes and their recently discovered generalizations with NUT charge and rotation are also exact solutions. We show that our bosonic solutions are also exact solutions of the heterotic string theory with no extra gauge field background.