Stringy AdS3 from the worldsheet

Abstract

We investigate the behaviour of the bosonic string on AdS3 with H-flux at stringy scales, looking in particular for a ‘tensionless’ limit in which there are massless higher spin gauge fields. We do this by revisiting the physical spectrum of the sl(2,ℝ)k WZW model and considering the limit in which k becomes small. At k = 3 we find that there is an infinite stringy tower of massless higher spin fields which are part of a continuum of light states. This can be viewed as a novel tensionless limit, which appears to be distinct from that inferred from the symmetric orbifold description of superstring AdS3 vacua.