Giant Vortices and the Regge Limit

In recent years it has been shown that strongly coupled systems become analytically tractable in the regime of large quantum numbers, such as large spin or large charge. The effective theories that emerge in these two limits are Regge theory and superfluid theory, respectively. Here we make a proposal for a new phase, the giant vortex, describing an intermediate regime with large spin and charge. The new phase connects superfluid theory with the large-spin expansion. The giant vortex admits a semi-classical effective theory description with peculiar chiral excitations (moving at the speed of light) and a Fock space of states that is reminiscent of the multi-twist operators in Regge theory, including the leading and daughter Regge trajectories. A similar giant vortex phase appears for Bose-Einstein condensates in a rotating trap, and our results should be applicable in that context as well. We show that the transition from the giant vortex to the Regge regime is accompanied by the scaling dimension turning from being larger than to being smaller than the mean field theory value, i.e. gravity switches from being the weakest force at small AdS distance to being the strongest force at large AdS distance.

Automated summary

It has been found that strongly coupled systems become analytically tractable when the quantum numbers are large, such as large spin or large charge. The effective theories in these limits are Regge theory and superfluid theory. This article proposes a new phase, called the giant vortex, which describes an intermediate regime with large spin and charge. The giant vortex connects superfluid theory with the large-spin expansion and has a semi-classical effective theory description with peculiar chiral excitations and a Fock space of states resembling the multi-twist operators in Regge theory.