Brane partons and singleton strings Original Research Article

We examine p-branes in image in two limits where they exhibit partonic behavior: rotating branes with energy concentrated to cusp-like solitons; tensionless branes with energy distributed over singletonic bits on the Dirac hypercone. Evidence for a smooth transition from cusps to bits are found. First, each cusp yields image normal-coordinate bound states with protected frequencies; and is dual to a short open p-brane becoming massless on the giant-vacuum brane at the end-of-the-universe. Second, the image-sector is an image-gauged phase-space sigma model giving rise to symmetrized image-pletons of the minimal higher-spin algebra image. The continuum limit leads to a 2d chiral image-gauged sigma model which is critical in image; equivalent à la Bars–Vasiliev to an image-gauged spinor string; and furthermore dual to WZW model in turn containing a topological image coset model giving rise to a chiral ring generated by singleton-valued weight-0 spin fields. Moreover, the two-bit truncation leads via a reformulation à la Cattaneo–Felder–Kontsevich to a topological open string on the phase space of the D-dimensional Dirac hypercone giving rise to the Vasiliev equations based on vector oscillators and weak image-projection. Geometrically, the bi-locality reflects broken boundary-singleton worldlines, and the intertwiner κ relates T- and R-ordered deformations of the boundary and the bulk of the worldsheet, respectively.