Conformal Chern-Simons holography - lock, stock and barrel

TL;DR

This paper explores how certain three-dimensional higher-curvature gravity theories can be fine-tuned to exhibit gauge symmetry enhancement, leading to conformal Chern-Simons gravity and diverse holographic dual scenarios with different boundary conditions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the non-linear reduction of higher-curvature actions to conformal Chern-Simons gravity and classifies boundary conditions affecting holographic duals.

Findings

Gauge symmetry enhancement at the linearized level.

Classification of boundary conditions and their impact.

Multiple holographic scenarios with different dual CFTs.

Abstract

We discuss a fine-tuning of rather generic three dimensional higher-curvature gravity actions that leads to gauge symmetry enhancement at the linearized level via partial masslessness. Requiring this gauge symmetry to be present also non-linearly reduces such actions to conformal Chern-Simons gravity. We perform a canonical analysis of this theory and construct the gauge generators and associated charges. We provide and classify admissible boundary conditions. The boundary conditions on the conformal equivalence class of the metric render one chirality of the partially massless Weyl gravitons normalizable and the remaining one non-normalizable. There are three choices - trivial, fixed or free - for the Weyl factors of the bulk metric and of the boundary metric. This proliferation of boundary conditions leads to various physically distinct scenarios of holography that we study in detail, extending considerably the discussion initiated in 1106.6299. In particular, the dual CFT may contain an additional scalar field with or without background charge, depending on the choices above.