Boundary conditions for General Relativity on AdS3 and the KdV hierarchy
Abstract:
It is shown that General Relativity with negative cosmological constant in 3D admits a new family of boundary conditions being labeled by a nonnegative integer k. Gravitational excitations are then described by boundary gravitons that fulfill the equations of the k-th element of the KdV hierarchy. In particular, k = 0 corresponds to the Brown-Henneaux boundary conditions so that excitations are described by chiral movers. In the case of k = 1, the boundary gravitons fulfill the KdV equation and the asymptotic symmetry algebra turns out to be infinite-dimensional, abelian and devoid of central extensions. The latter feature also holds for the remaining cases that describe the hierarchy (k > 1). Our boundary conditions then provide a gravitational dual of two noninteracting left and right KdV movers, and hence, boundary gravitons possess anisotropic Lifshitz scaling with dynamical exponent z = 2k + 1. Remarkably, despite spacetimes solving the field equations are locally AdS, they possess anisotropic scaling being induced by the choice of boundary conditions. As an application, the entropy of a rotating BTZ black hole is precisely recovered from a suitable generalization of the Cardy formula that is compatible with the anisotropic scaling of the chiral KdV movers at the boundary.