Cosmological Topologically Massive Gravitons and Photons
Abstract
We study topologically massive (2+1)-dimensional gravity with a negative cosmological constant. The masses of the linearized curvature excitations about AdS_3 backgrounds are not only shifted from their flat background values but, more surprisingly, split according to chirality. For all finite values of the topological mass, we find a single bulk degree of freedom with positive energy, and exhibit a complete set of normalizable, finite-energy wave packet solutions. This model can also be written as a sum of two higher-derivative SL(2,R) Chern--Simons theories, weighted by the central charges of the boundary conformal field theory. At two particular "critical" values of the couplings, one of these central charges vanishes, and linearized topologically massive gravity becomes equivalent to topologically massive electromagnetism; however, the physics of the bulk wave packets remains unaltered here.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0803.3998,
title = {Cosmological Topologically Massive Gravitons and Photons},
author = {S. Carlip and S. Deser and A. Waldron and D. K. Wise},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0803.3998},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
36 pages, 1 figure. v2: Expanded; exhibits localized normalizable wave packets and exact chiral pp-wave solutions. v3: Added references; clarification on bulk vs. boundary chirality. v4: Published version; changes include discussion of bulk solutions' asymptotic acceptability at all mu