Operators dual to strings attached to giant graviton branes in AdS 5 × S 5 can be described rather explicitly in the dual N ¼ 4 super-Yang-Mills theory. They have a bare dimension of order N so that for these operators the large N limit and the planar limit are distinct; summing only the planar diagrams will not capture the large N dynamics. Focusing on the one-loop SUð3Þ sector of the theory, we consider operators that are a small deformation of a 1 2 -Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) multigiant graviton state. The diagonalization of the dilatation operator at one loop has been carried out in previous studies, but explicit formulas for the operators of a good scaling dimension are only known when certain terms which were argued to be small are neglected. In this article, we include the terms which were neglected. The diagonalization is achieved by a novel mapping which replaces the problem of diagonalizing the dilatation operator with a system of bosons hopping on a lattice. The giant gravitons define the sites of this lattice, and the open strings stretching between distinct giant gravitons define the hopping terms of the Hamiltonian. Using the lattice boson model, we argue that the lowest energy giant graviton states are obtained by distributing the momenta carried by the X and Y fields evenly between the giants with the condition that any particular giant carries only X or Y momenta, but not both.

The state space of excited giant graviton brane systems is given by the Gauss graph operators. After restricting to the su(2|3) sector of the theory, we consider this state space. Our main result is the decomposition of this state space into irreducible representations of the su(2|2) R global symmetry. Excitations of the giant graviton branes are charged under a central extension of the global symmetry. The central extension generates gauge transformations so that the action of the central extension vanishes on physical states. Indeed, we explicitly demonstrate that the central charge is set to zero by the Gauss Law of the brane world volume gauge theory.