The asymptotic structure of AdS spacetimes in the context of General Relativity coupled to the Maxwell field in three spacetime dimensions is analyzed. Although the fall-off of the fields is relaxed with respect to that of Brown and Henneaux, the variation of the canonical generators associated to the asymptotic Killing vectors can be shown to be finite once required to span the Lie derivative of the fields. The corresponding surface integrals then acquire explicit contributions from the electromagnetic field, and become well-defined provided they fulfill suitable integrability conditions, implying that the leading terms of the asymptotic form of the electromagnetic field are functionally related. Consequently, for a generic choice of boundary conditions, the asymptotic symmetries are broken down to R ⊗ U (1) ⊗ U (1). Nonetheless, requiring compatibility of the boundary conditions with one of the asymptotic Virasoro symmetries, singles out the set to be characterized by an arbitrary function of a single variable, whose precise form depends on the choice of the chiral copy. Remarkably, requiring the asymptotic symmetries to contain the full conformal group selects a very special set of boundary conditions that is labeled by a unique constant parameter, so that the algebra of the canonical generators is given by the direct sum of two copies of the Virasoro algebra with the standard central extension and U (1). This special set of boundary conditions makes the energy spectrum of electrically charged rotating black holes to be well-behaved.

Stationary circularly symmetric solutions of General Relativity with negative cosmological constant coupled to the Maxwell field are analyzed in three spacetime dimensions. Taking into account that the fall-off of the fields is slower than the standard one for a localized distribution of matter, it is shown that, by virtue of a suitable choice of the electromagnetic Lagrange multiplier, the action attains a bona fide extremum provided the asymptotic form of the electromagnetic field fulfills a nontrivial integrability condition. As a consequence, the mass and the angular momentum become automatically finite, without the need of any regularization procedure, and they generically acquire contributions from the electromagnetic field. Therefore, unlike the higher-dimensional case, it is found that the precise value of the mass and the angular momentum explicitly depends on the choice of boundary conditions. It can also be seen that requiring compatibility of the boundary conditions with the Lorentz and scaling symmetries of the class of stationary solutions, singles out a very special set of "holographic boundary conditions" that is described by a single parameter. Remarkably, in stark contrast with the somewhat pathological behaviour found in the standard case, for the holographic boundary conditions (i) the energy spectrum of an electrically charged (rotating) black hole is nonnegative, and (ii) for a fixed value of the mass, the electric charge is bounded from above.

The thermodynamic properties of the Bañados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black hole endowed with Korteweg-de Vries (KdV)-type boundary conditions are considered. This familiy of boundary conditions for General Relativity on AdS 3 is labeled by a nonnegative integer n, and gives rise to a dual theory which possesses anisotropic Lifshitz scaling invariance with dynamical exponent z = 2n + 1. We show that from the scale invariance of the action for stationary and circularly symmetric spacetimes, an anisotropic version of the Smarr relation arises, and we prove that it is totally consistent with the previously reported anisotropic Cardy formula. The set of KdV-type boundary conditions defines an unconventional thermodynamic ensemble, which leads to a generalized description of the thermal stability of the system. Finally, we show that at the self-dual temperature T s = 1 2π ( 1 z ) z z+1 , there is a Hawking-Page phase transition between the BTZ black hole and thermal AdS 3 spacetime. arXiv:1907.13026v2 [hep-th]