MS Seminar (Mathematics - String Theory)

Speaker: Gaston Giribet (University of Buenos Aires and CONICET, Argentina)
Title: On three-dimensional chiral gravity
Date (JST): Thu, Jun 11, 2009, 15:30 - 17:00
Place: Seminar Room at IPMU Prefab. B
Abstract: In the last two years there has been a revived interest in three-dimensional theories of gravity. The proposal by E. Witten that 2+1 D Einstein gravity in AdS_3 space is dual to a holomorphically factorizable CFT_2 has attracted considerable attention, and led to intense debate. Another model of 2+1 D gravity that has attracted much attention recently is Topologically Massive Gravity, which corresponds to the three-dimensional Einstein gravity augmented with a gravitational Chern-Simons term. This theory contains local massive graviton degrees of freedom, and also admits black hole solutions. The holographic description of Topologically Massive Gravity in terms of a CFT_2 exhibits special properties when the square of the Chern-Simons coupling equals the cosmological constant, and this led W. Li, W. Song and A.Strominger to conjecture that the theory might be chiral at that point of the space of parameters. In this talk, I will review the recent advances in this subject and discuss the still controversial "Chiral Gravity Conjecture".