The Special Locus

Abstract

The special locus plays an important role in the construction of the non-BPS microstate geometries known as microstrata. These supergravity solutions are dual to combinations of left-moving and right-moving momentum states in the D1-D5 CFT and because supersymmetry is broken the anomalous dimensions of these states are not protected. This means even the simplest combinations of excitations can create a cascade of frequency dependences through the non-linearities of the supergravity interactions. Solutions on the special locus manage to lock some of these anomalous dimensions together and allow one to construct complete solutions using gauged supergravity in three dimensions. In the dual holographic CFT, the special locus has been shown to correspond to creating a "pure" gas of single particle states, however, in supergravity the special locus remains mysterious especially because it does not seem to be defined by a geometric symmetry. In this paper we reveal the supergravity structure of the special locus, first in three-dimensional supergravity and then in the uplift to six dimensions and IIB supergravity. The key insight is that, in three dimensions, a family of dual vector fields must vanish, and this implies that there are algebraic relations between tensor gauge fields in six and ten dimensions. These insights show how one can generalize the special locus Ansatz to more general mode excitations of six-dimensional supergravity. We also construct the full six-dimensional uplift of the simplest special locus.