Towards the solution to the giant graviton puzzle

Abstract

In this note we present several ideas toward the solution to the giant graviton puzzle - the apparent multiplicity of supergravity states dual to field theory chiral primary operators. We use the fact that, for certain ranges of the angular momentum, giant gravitons can be mapped into vacua of a dual theory to argue that the sphere and $AdS$ giant gravitons have very different boundary descriptions, and that an unpolarized KK graviton is unphysical in the regime where giant gravitons exist. We also show that a generic boundary state can correspond to different giant graviton configurations, which have non-overlapping ranges of validity.