Inequivalent light-cone gauge-fixings of strings on AdSn×Sn backgrounds

Abstract

Light-cone gauge-fixed sigma models on AdSn×Sn backgrounds play an important role in the integrability formulation of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The string spectrum of the sigma model is gauge independent, however the Hamiltonian and scattering matrix of the transverse world sheet fields are not. We study how these change for a large family of inequivalent light-cone gauges, which are interpreted as TT¯, J˜Tτ, JTσ, and Jτ deformations. We investigate the moduli space of inequivalent light-cone gauges and, specializing to AdS5×S5, compute the different light-cone gauge symmetry algebras, well known to be psu(2|2)⊕2⊕u(1)⊕2 for the standard gauge-fixing. Many integrable deformations require a nonstandard light-cone gauge, hence our classification and analysis of inequivalent gauges will be important for analyzing such models. Published by the American Physical Society 2024