Nicolas Kovensky

These lecture notes, based on the course given at IPhT in November/December 2023, provide a pedagogical introduction to the study of strings in AdS _3 3 backgrounds supported by NSNS flux from the worldsheet perspective, including a number of updates incorporating recent results. We attempt to give a self-contained overview of the state-of-the-art understanding of this topic, describing key aspects of its 25-year-long rich history alongside some important recent developments, with an emphasis on the computation of worldsheet correlation functions involving spectrally flowed insertions.

A bstract: We study spacetime four-point functions of chiral primary operators for superstrings propagating in AdS ₃ × S ³ × T ⁴ from the worldsheet perspective, allowing for external states with arbitrary spectral flow charges. We work at small boundary cross-ratio and consider both extremal (supersymmetry-protected) and non-extremal configurations. The string correlators involve a non-trivial integration over the worldsheet moduli, and we demonstrate how the exchange of short and long strings is encoded in distinct integration regions. We interpret our results in terms of the operator product expansion in the boundary theory, and make explicit the precise matching with the available data for the relevant holographic correlators.

A bstract: Baryons in the holographic Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model are described by instanton solutions on the flavor branes. A commonly used approximation for dense baryonic matter replaces the many-instanton solution by a simpler, spatially homogeneous, ansatz, which requires a discontinuity in the holographic direction of the non-abelian gauge field in order to account for topological baryon number. We point out that the simplest configuration with a single jump — often used in previous studies — results in matter at saturation density that is much stiffer than real-world nuclear matter. This is improved, although not completely remedied, by adding a second jump. We present a systematic discussion of all possible configurations up to four jumps, dynamically computing locations of and behavior at the discontinuities. We find solutions that continuously connect to those based on pointlike baryons, thus, for the first time, establishing a concrete link between the instantonic and homogeneous pictures. This is supported by translating the multi-jump profiles of the gauge field into gauge invariant multi-layer charge distributions. The most important of our novel configurations has a block-like structure in the bulk, becomes pointlike at low density and/or large coupling, and is energetically preferred over all previously studied configurations. Therefore, our work lays the ground for improved predictions from holography for dense nuclear matter in neutron stars.

We study spacetime four-point functions of chiral primary operators for superstrings propagating in AdS$_3\times S^3\times T^4$ from the worldsheet perspective, allowing for external states with arbitrary spectral flow charges. We work at small boundary cross-ratio and consider both extremal (supersymmetry-protected) and non-extremal configurations. The string correlators involve a non-trivial integration over the worldsheet moduli, and we demonstrate how the exchange of short and long strings is encoded in distinct integration regions. We interpret our results in terms of the operator product expansion in the boundary theory, and make explicit the precise matching with the available data for the relevant holographic correlators.

The holographic Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model is often employed to describe strongly-coupled baryonic and isospin-asymmetric matter, for example in the context of neutron stars. Here we consider the case of vanishing baryon chemical potential, where detailed comparisons to data from lattice QCD are possible. To this end, we extend previous works by including a realistic pion mass and pion condensation into the decompactified limit of the model and evaluate the system for arbitrary isospin chemical potentials and temperatures. After suitably fixing the 3 parameters of the model, we find that the overall phase structure is in excellent agreement with lattice results. This also holds for observables at low temperatures in the strongly coupled regime, while we discover and discuss some discrepancies at large temperatures. Our findings give reassurance for the validity of previous and future applications of this model and highlight the aspects where improvements are needed.

A bstract: We present a detailed study of spectrally flowed four-point functions in the SL(2,ℝ) WZW model, focusing on their conformal block decomposition. Dei and Eberhardt conjectured a general formula relating these observables to their unflowed counterparts. Although the latter are not known in closed form, their conformal block expansion has been formally established. By combining this information with the integral transform that encodes the effect of spectral flow, we show how to describe a considerable number of s -channel exchanges, including cases with both flowed and unflowed intermediate states. For all such processes, we compute the normalization of the corresponding conformal blocks in terms of products of the recently derived flowed three-point functions with arbitrary spectral flow charges. Our results constitute a highly non-trivial consistency check, thus strongly supporting the aforementioned conjecture, and establishing its computational power.

We improve the holographic description of isospin-asymmetric baryonic matter within the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model by accounting for a realistic pion mass, computing the pion condensate dynamically, and including rho meson condensation by allowing the gauge field in the bulk to be anisotropic. This description takes into account the coexistence of baryonic matter with pion and rho meson condensates. Our main result is the zero-temperature phase diagram in the plane of baryon and isospin chemical potentials. We find that the effective pion mass in the baryonic medium increases with baryon density and that, as a consequence, there is no pion condensation in neutron-star matter. Our improved description also predicts that baryons are disfavored at low baryon chemical potentials even for arbitrarily large isospin chemical potential. Instead, rho meson condensation sets in on top of the pion condensate at an isospin chemical potential of about 9.4\, m_\pi 9.4 m π . We further observe a highly non-monotonic phase boundary regarding the disappearance of pion condensation.

We compute all worldsheet three-point functions involving spectrally-flowed operators in chiral multiplets of the space-time theory for strings in AdS₃×S³×T⁴, thus completing the analysis of the full AdS₃/CFT₂ chiral ring. We make use of techniques recently developed for the bosonic sector, based on holomorphic covering maps from the worldsheet to the AdS₃ boundary. We highlight the role of the so-called series identifications when dealing with the complications originated by picture-changing spectrally-flowed states. We find an exact agreement with the predictions from the holographic CFT at the symmetric orbifold point.

We compute all worldsheet three-point functions involving spectrally-flowed operators in chiral multiplets of the space-time theory for strings in AdS$_3\times$S$^3\times$T$^4$, thus completing the analysis of the full AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$ chiral ring. We make use of techniques recently developed for the bosonic sector, based on holomorphic covering maps from the worldsheet to the AdS$_3$ boundary. We highlight the role of the so-called series identifications when dealing with the complications originated by picture-changing spectrally-flowed states. We find an exact agreement with the predictions from the holographic CFT at the symmetric orbifold point, including both extremal and non-extremal correlators.