2024/02/07 by Nicholas Agia, Agia, Nicholas, Daniel L. Jafferis +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.05167
openalex publication_date 2024/02/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We explicitly construct the states of the 2d free boson on the infinite line with specified asymptotic charges. The Minkowski CFT states derive from (the analytic continuation of) the shrinking limit of Euclidean angular quantization, wherein the superselection sector for fixed asymptotic charges corresponds to specific endpoint operators for the angular quantization on the sphere. When applied to string theory, we obtain a new class of fundamental strings that are neither open nor closed and which we dub "stretched strings". We describe constant-time snapshots of the worldsheets of the different types of stretched strings, and as a special case we find a heuristic picture of Maldacena's "long strings" in the c=1 string theory.