Magnons, their solitonic avatars and the Pohlmeyer reduction

Abstract

We study the solitons of the symmetric space sine-Gordon theories that arise once the Pohlmeyer reduction has been imposed on a sigma model with the symmetric space as target. Under this map the solitons arise as giant magnons that are relevant to string theory in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. In particular, we consider the cases S n, P n and SU(n) in some detail. We clarify the construction of the charges carried by the solitons and also address the possible Lagrangian formulations of the symmetric space sine-Gordon theories. We show that the dressing, or Bäcklund, transformation naturally produces solitons directly in both the sigma model and the symmetric space sine-Gordon equations without the need to explicitly map from one to the other. In particular, we obtain a new magnon solution in P 3. We show that the dressing method does not produce the more general ''dyonic'' solutions which involve non-trivial motion of the collective coordinates carried by the solitons. © 2009 SISSA.