Circular strings, magnons, plane waves and local quenches in BTZ

A bstract We show that string theory on the geometry BTZ × S 3 × M supported with either Neveu-Schwarz flux or Ramond flux admits states which obey identical dispersion relations to those of classical solutions like circular strings, giant magnons, or plane wave excitations in the geometry AdS 3 × S 3 × M . Here, M can be T 4 , K 3, or S 3 × S 1 . This is made possible by the map, which takes the particle at the origin of AdS 3 with angular momentum along one of the angles of S 3 to a particle falling into the BTZ horizon. We use this map to construct circular strings, magnons, as well as plane waves in the BTZ geometry. We show that the SL (2, R ) charges of these states on AdS 3 and that of the corresponding states in the BTZ geometry are related by a boost. The dual description of these states in the BTZ geometry are local quenches in the thermal CFT. These quenches carry energy density, R -charges, non-trivial expectation value of the marginal operator dual to the dilaton and move on the light cone in CFT. In general, the left and the right moving quenches are not symmetric.