Celestial fields on the string and the Schwarzian action

Abstract

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.