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Extreme and very-near-extreme spin J Kerr black holes have been conjectured to be holographically dual to two-dimensional (2D) conformal field theories (CFTs) with left and right central charges cL=cR=12J. In this paper it is observed that the 2D conformal symmetry of the scalar wave equation at low frequencies persists for generic nonextreme values of the mass M≠J√. Interestingly, this conformal symmetry is not derived from a conformal symmetry of the spacetime geometry except in the extreme limit. The 2π periodic identification of the azimuthal angle ϕ is shown to correspond to a spontaneous breaking of the conformal symmetry by left and right temperatures TL=M2/2πJ and TR=√M4−J2 /2πJ. The well-known low-frequency scalar-Kerr scattering amplitudes coincide with correlators of a 2D CFT at these temperatures. Moreover, the CFT microstate degeneracy inferred from the Cardy formula agrees exactly with the Bekenstein-Hawking area law for all M and J. These observations provide evidence for the conjecture that the Kerr black hole is dual to a cL=cR=12J 2D CFT at temperatures (TL,TR) for every value of M and J., Physics

We show that the linearization of all exact solutions of classical chiral gravity around the AdS3 vacuum have positive energy. Non-chiral and negative-energy solutions of the linearized equations are infrared divergent at second order, and so are removed from the spectrum. In other words, chirality is confined and the equations of motion have linearization instabilities. We prove that the only stationary, axially symmetric solutions of chiral gravity are BTZ black holes, which have positive energy. It is further shown that classical log gravity – the theory with logarithmically relaxed boundary conditions – has finite asymptotic symmetry generators but is not chiral and hence may be dual at the quantum level to a logarithmic CFT. Moreover we show that log gravity contains chiral gravity within it as a decoupled charge superselection sector. We formally evaluate the Euclidean sum over geometries of chiral gravity and show that it gives precisely the holomorphic extremal CFT partition function. The modular invariance and integrality of the expansion coefficients of this partition function are consistent with the existence of an exact quantum theory of chiral gravity. We argue that the problem of quantizing chiral gravity is the holographic dual of the problem of constructing an extremal CFT, while quantizing log gravity is dual to the problem of constructing a logarithmic extremal CFT., Physics

We consider the one-loop partition function of free quantum field theory in locally Anti-de Sitter space-times. In three dimensions, the one loop determinants for scalar, gauge and graviton excitations are computed explicitly using heat kernel techniques. We obtain precisely the result anticipated by Brown and Henneaux: the partition function includes a sum over "boundary excitations" of AdS3, which are the Virasoro descendants of empty Anti-de Sitter space. This result also allows us to compute the one-loop corrections to the Euclidean action of the BTZ black hole as well its higher genus generalizations., Physics