Bekker, David2008-06-262008-06-262008-06-26http://hdl.handle.net/10539/4986In this dissertation we study the dynamics of excited giant gravitons. Giant gravitons are spherical membranes with a D3-brane dipole charge. Giant gravitons are excited by attaching open strings to them. We develop techniques to compute the one-loop anomalous dimensions of operators in the N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory which are dual to open strings ending on boundstates of sphere giant gravitons. The results presented in this dissertation are applicable to excitations involving an arbitrary number of strings. We consider open strings which carry angular momentum on an S3 embedded in the S5 of the AdS5×S5 background. The problem of computing the one-loop anomalous dimensions is replaced by the problem of diagonalizing an interacting Cuntz oscillator Hamiltonian. We provide evidence that our Cuntz oscillator dynamics show how Chan-Paton factors emerge dynamically580780 bytesapplication/pdfenGiant gravitonsThesis