Giant gravitons: A collective coordinate approach

In this paper I describe a collective coordinate approach to the study of giant graviton states and their excitations in various field theories. The method simplifies considerably the understanding of the emergent gauge symmetry of these configurations, as well as the calculation of the spectrum of strings stretched between the giant gravitons. There is a limit where these results reproduce the one-loop dispersion relation for giant magnons. I also show that this method gives rise to a simple geometric interpretation of a Higgs mechanism for the emergent gauge symmetry which parallels the holographic dual realization of these states: the effective Higgs condensate is the geometric separation of D-branes in the collective coordinate geometry.