arXiv:hep-th/0206107v1 12 Jun 2002 OHSTPY-HEP-T-02-007 hep-th/0206107 Rotating deformations of AdS 3 × S 3 , the orbifold CFT and strings in the pp-wave limit Oleg Lunin and Samir D. Mathur Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA Abstract We construct an exact metric which at short distances is the metric of massless particles in 5+1 spacetime (moving along a diameter of the sphere) and is AdS 3 ×S 3 at infinity. We also consider a set of a conical defect spacetimes which are locally AdS 3 × S 3 and have the masses and charges of a special set of chiral primaries of the dual orbifold CFT. We find that excitation energies for a scalar field in the latter geometries agree exactly with the excitations in the corresponding CFT state created by twist operators: redshift in the geometry reproduces ‘long circle’ physics in the CFT. We propose a map of string states in AdS 3 × S 3 × T 4 to states in the orbifold CFT, analogous to the recently discovered map for AdS 5 × S 5 . The vibrations of the string can be pictured as oscillations of a Fermi sea in the CFT. 1