String Theory seminar - David Vegh Seminar

The classical motion of a Nambu-Goto string in AdS_3 spacetime is governed by the generalized sinh-Gordon equation. It can locally be reduced to the sinh-Gordon, cosh-Gordon, or Liouville equation, depending on the value of the scalar curvature of the induced metric. In this talk, I examine solutions that contain both sinh-Gordon-type and cosh-Gordon-type regions. I show that near the boundaries of these regions (generalized) solitons can be classically pair-produced. The solitons move subluminally (superluminally) in the sinh-Gordon (cosh-Gordon) region on the worldsheet, and they correspond to cusps on the string. For the calculations, I use an exact discretization of the equation of motion. The solutions correspond to segmented strings.