Celestial fields on the string and the Schwarzian action

Abstract

This paper describes the motion of a classical Nambu-Goto string in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime in terms of two `celestial' fields on the worldsheet. The fields correspond to retarded and advanced boundary times at which null rays emanating from the string reach the boundary. The formalism allows for a simple derivation of the Schwarzian action for near-AdS2 embeddings.