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 Sn, Pn 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 Backlund, 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 P3. 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.