Open spin chains for giant gravitons and relativity

Understand

We study open spin chains for strings stretched between giant graviton states in the N=4 SYM field theory in the collective coordinate approach.

• We study the boundary conditions and the effective Hamiltonian of the corresponding spin chain to two loop order.
• The ground states of the spin chain have energies that match the relativistic dispersion relation characteristic of massive W boson particles on the worldvolume of the giant graviton configurations, up to second order in the limit where the momentum is much larger than the mass.
• We find evidence for a non-renormalization theorem for the ground state wave function of this spin chain system.