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.
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ArXiv ePrint: 0909.0727
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Andrade, T., Marolf, D. No chiral truncation of quantum log gravity?. J. High Energ. Phys. 2010, 29 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2010)029
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2010)029