English

No chiral truncation of quantum log gravity?

High Energy Physics - Theory 2010-03-19 v2

Abstract

At the classical level, chiral gravity may be constructed as a consistent truncation of a larger theory called log gravity by requiring that left-moving charges vanish. In turn, log gravity is the limit of topologically massive gravity (TMG) at a special value of the coupling (the chiral point). We study the situation at the level of linearized quantum fields, focussing on a unitary quantization. While the TMG Hilbert space is continuous at the chiral point, the left-moving Virasoro generators become ill-defined and cannot be used to define a chiral truncation. In a sense, the left-moving asymptotic symmetries are spontaneously broken at the chiral point. In contrast, in a non-unitary quantization of TMG, both the Hilbert space and charges are continuous at the chiral point and define a unitary theory of chiral gravity at the linearized level.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0909.0727,
  title  = {No chiral truncation of quantum log gravity?},
  author = {Tomas Andrade and Donald Marolf},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0909.0727},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

20 pages, no figures, references added

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:42:25.531Z