In order to get a better understanding of holographic properties of gravitational theories with a vanishing cosmological constant, we analyze in detail the relation between asymptotically anti-de Sitter and asymptotically flat spacetimes in three dimensions. This relation is somewhat subtle because the limit of vanishing cosmological constant cannot be naively taken in standard Fefferman-Graham coordinates. After reformulating the standard anti-de Sitter results in Robinson-Trautman coordinates, a suitably modified Penrose limit is shown to connect both asymptotic regimes. * gbarnich@ulb.ac.be; Research Director of the Fund for Scientific Research Belgium † agomberoff@unab.cl ‡ hdgonzal@uc.cl arXiv:1204.3288v1 [gr-qc] 15 Apr 2012 [1] A. Maloney and E. Witten, JHEP 1002, 029 (2010), arXiv:0712.0155 [hep-th].

We investigate duality properties of N -form fields, provide a symmetric way of coupling them to electric/magnetic sources, and check that these charges obey the appropriate quantization requirements. First, we contrast the D = 4k case, in which duality is a well-defined SO(2) rotation generated by a Chern-Simons form leaving the action invariant, and D = 4k + 2 where the corresponding ostensibly SO(1,1) rotation is not only not an invariance but does not even have a generator. When charged sources are included we show explicitly in the Maxwell case how the usual Dirac quantization arises in a fully symmetric approach attaching strings to both types of charges. Finally, for D = 4k + 2 systems, we show how charges can be introduced for self-dual (2k)-forms, and obtain the D = 4k models with sources by dimensional reduction, tracing their duality invariance to a partial invariance in the higher dimensions.

We construct Gödel-type black hole and particle solutions to Einstein-Maxwell theory in 2+1 dimensions with a negative cosmological constant and a Chern-Simons term. On-shell, the electromagnetic stress-energy tensor effectively replaces the cosmological constant by minus the square of the topological mass and produces the stress-energy of a pressure-free perfect fluid. We show how a particular solution is related to the original Gödel universe and analyze the solutions from the point of view of identifications. Finally, we compute the conserved charges and work out the thermodynamics.

ABSTRACT. In the gravitational context, Liouville theory is the two-dimensional conformal field theory that controls the boundary dynamics of asymptotically AdS 3 spacetimes at the classical level. By taking a suitable limit of the coupling constants of the Hamiltonian formulation of Liouville, we construct and analyze a BMS 3 invariant two-dimensional field theory that is likely to control the boundary dynamics at null infinity of three dimensional asymptotically flat gravity.

Anti-de Sitter space with identified points give rise to black-hole structures. This was first pointed out in three dimensions, and generalized to higher dimensions by Aminneborg et al. In this paper, we analyse several aspects of the five dimensional anti-de Sitter black hole including, its relation to thermal anti-de Sitter space, its embedding in a Chern-Simons supergravity theory, its global charges and holonomies, and the existence of Killing spinors.