Four Dimensional Plane Wave String Solutions with Coset CFT Description

Abstract We present a number of D = 4 bosonic and heterotic string solutions with a covariantly constant null Killing vector which, like the solution of Nappi and Witten (NW), correspond to (gauged) WZW models and thus have a direct conformal field theory interpretation. A class of exact plane wave solutions (which includes the NW solution) is constructed by ‘boosting’ the twisted products of two D = 2 ‘cosmological’ or ‘black-hole’ cosets related to (G ⊗G′)/(H ⊗H ) (G,G = SL(2, IR) or SU(2); H,H ′ = SO(1, 1) or SO(2)) gauged WZW models. We describe a general limiting procedure by which one can construct new solutions with a covariantly constant null Killing vector starting with known string backgrounds. By applying a non-abelian duality transformation to the NW model we find a D = 4 solution which admits a covariantly constant null Killing vector but is not a plane wave. Higher dimensional bosonic backgrounds with isometries can be interpreted as lower dimensional backgrounds with extra gauge fields. Some of them are at the same time solutions of the heterotic string theory. In particular, the NW model represents also a D = 3 gravi-electromagnetic heterotic string plane wave. In addition to the (1,1) supersymmetric embeddings of bosonic solutions we construct a number of non-trivial (1,0) supersymmetric exact D = 4 heterotic string plane wave solutions some of which are related (by a boost and analytic continuation) to limiting cases of D = 4 heterotic black hole solutions.