Giant Holes

Abstract

We study the semiclassical spectrum of excitations around a long spinning string in AdS_3. In addition to the usual small fluctuations, we find the spectrum contains a branch of solitonic excitations of finite energy. We determine the dispersion relation for these excitations. This has a relativistic form at low energies but also matches the dispersion relation for the "hole" of the dual gauge theory spin chain at high energies. The low-energy behaviour is consistent with the hypothesis that the solitonic excitations studied here are continuously related to the elementary excitations of the string.