Dimensional reduction of the S 3/WZW duality

Abstract Recently proposed duality relates the critical level limit $$\widehat{k}\to -2$$ of $${\text{SU}}{\left(2\right)}_{\widehat{k}}$$ WZW models to a classical three-dimensional Einstein gravity on a sphere. In this paper, we propose a dimensional reduced version of this duality. The gravity side is reduced to a Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity on S 2 with a non-standard boundary term, or a BF theory with SU(2) gauge symmetry. At least in low temperature limit, these two-dimensional gravity theories completely capture the original three-dimensional gravity effect. The CFT side is reduced to a certain complex Liouville quantum mechanics (LQM) with SU(2) gauge symmetry. Our proposal gives an interesting example of a holography without boundary. We also discuss a higher-spin generalization with SU(N) gauge symmetry.