Three-dimensional Einstein gravity with negative cosmological constant admits stationary black holes that are not necessarily spherically symmetric. We propose boundary conditions for the near horizon region of these black holes that lead to a surprisingly simple near horizon symmetry algebra consisting of two affine u(1) current algebras. The symmetry algebra is essentially equivalent to the Heisenberg algebra. The associated charges give a specific example of "soft hair" on the horizon, as defined by Hawking, Perry and Strominger. We show that soft hair does not contribute to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli black holes and "black flower" generalizations. From the near horizon perspective the conformal generators at asymptotic infinity appear as composite operators, which we interpret in the spirit of black hole complementarity. Another remarkable feature of our boundary conditions is that they are singled out by requiring that the whole spectrum is compatible with regularity at the horizon, regardless the value of the global charges like mass or angular momentum. Finally, we address black hole microstates and generalizations to cosmological horizons.Comment: 6p

The theory of massive gravity in three dimensions recently proposed by Bergshoeff, Hohm and Townsend (BHT) is considered. At the special case when the theory admits a unique maximally symmetric solution, a conformally flat solution that contains black holes and gravitational solitons for any value of the cosmological constant is found. For negative cosmological constant, the black hole is characterized in terms of the mass and the "gravitational hair" parameter, providing a lower bound for the mass. For negative mass parameter, the black hole acquires an inner horizon, and the entropy vanishes at the extremal case. Gravitational solitons and kinks, being regular everywhere, can be obtained from a double Wick rotation of the black hole. A wormhole solution in vacuum that interpolates between two static universes of negative spatial curvature is obtained as a limiting case of the gravitational soliton with a suitable identification. The black hole and the gravitational soliton fit within a set of relaxed asymptotically AdS conditions as compared with the one of Brown and Henneaux. In the case of positive cosmological constant the black hole possesses an event and a cosmological horizon, whose mass is bounded from above. Remarkably, the temperatures of the event and the cosmological horizons coincide, and at the extremal case one obtains the analogue of the Nariai solution, dS 2 × S 1 . A gravitational soliton is also obtained through a double Wick rotation of the black hole. The Euclidean continuation of these solutions describes instantons with vanishing Euclidean action. For vanishing cosmological constant the black hole and the gravitational soliton are asymptotically locally flat spacetimes. The rotating solutions can be obtained by boosting the previous ones in the t − φ plane.

Three-dimensional spacetime with a negative cosmological constant has proven to be a remarkably fertile ground for the study of gravity and higher spin fields. The theory is topological and, since there are no propagating field degrees of freedom, the asymptotic symmetries become all the more crucial. For pure (2+1) gravity they consist of two copies of the Virasoro algebra. There exists a black hole which may be endowed with all the corresponding charges. The pure (2+1) gravity theory may be reformulated in terms of two Chern-Simons connections for sl (2, R). This permits an immediate generalization which may be interpreted as containing gravity and a finite number of higher spin fields. The generalization is achieved by replacing sl (2, R) by sl (3, R) or, more generally, by sl (N, R). The asymptotic symmetries are then two copies of the so-called W N algebra, which contains the Virasoro algebra as a subalgebra. The question then arises as to whether there exists a generalization of the standard pure gravity (2+1) black hole which would be endowed with all the W N charges. Since the generalized Chern-Simons theory does not admit a direct metric interpretation, one must define the black hole in Euclidean spacetime through its thermal properties, and then continue to Lorentzian spacetime. The original pioneering proposal of a black hole along this line for N = 3 turns out, as shown in this paper, to actually belong to the so called "diagonal embedding" of sl (2, R) in sl (3, R), and it is therefore endowed with charges of lower rather than higher spins. In contradistinction, we exhibit herein the most general black hole which belongs to the "principal embedding". It is endowed with higher spin charges, and possesses two copies of W 3 as its asymptotic symmetries. The most general diagonal embedding black hole is studied in detail as well, JHEP05 (2014)031 in a way in which its lower spin charges are clearly displayed. The extension to N > 3 is also discussed. A general formula for the entropy of a generalized black hole is obtained in terms of the on-shell holonomies. The relationship between the asymptotic symmetries and the chemical potentials is exhibited, and the equivalence of the different thermodynamical ensembles is discussed. A self-contained account of the background necessary to substantiate the claims made in the paper is included.

We discuss some aspects of soft hairy black holes and a new kind of "soft hairy cosmologies", including a detailed derivation of the metric formulation, results on flat space, and novel observations concerning the entropy. Remarkably, like in the case with negative cosmological constant, we find that the asymptotic symmetries for locally flat spacetimes with a horizon are governed by infinite copies of the Heisenberg algebra that generate soft hair descendants. It is also shown that the generators of the three-dimensional Bondi-Metzner-Sachs algebra arise from composite operators of the affine u(1) currents through a twisted Sugawara-like construction. We then discuss entropy macroscopically, thermodynamically and microscopically and discover that a microscopic formula derived recently for boundary conditions associated to the Korteweg-de Vries hierarchy fits perfectly our results for entropy and ground state energy. We conclude with a comparison to related approaches.Comment: 22 pp, v2: added ref

It is shown that General Relativity with negative cosmological constant in three spacetime dimensions admits a new family of boundary conditions being labeled by a nonnegative integer k. Gravitational excitations are then described by "boundary gravitons" that fulfill the equations of the k-th element of the KdV hierarchy. In particular, k = 0 corresponds to the Brown-Henneaux boundary conditions so that excitations are described by chiral movers. In the case of k = 1, the boundary gravitons fulfill the KdV equation and the asymptotic symmetry algebra turns out to be infinite-dimensional, abelian and devoid of central extensions. The latter feature also holds for the remaining cases that describe the hierarchy (k > 1). Our boundary conditions then provide a gravitational dual of two noninteracting left and right KdV movers, and hence, boundary gravitons possess anisotropic Lifshitz scaling with dynamical exponent z = 2k + 1. Remarkably, despite spacetimes solving the field equations are locally AdS, they possess anisotropic scaling being induced by the choice of boundary conditions. As an application, the entropy of a rotating BTZ black hole is precisely recovered from a suitable generalization of the Cardy formula that is compatible with the anisotropic scaling of the chiral KdV movers at the boundary, in which the energy of AdS spacetime with our boundary conditions depends on z and plays the role of the central charge. The extension of our boundary conditions to the case of higher spin gravity and its link with different classes of integrable systems is also briefly addressed.

We indicate how to introduce chemical potentials for higher spin charges in higher spin anti-de Sitter gravity in a manner that manifestly preserves the original asymptotic W -symmetry. This is done by switching on a non-vanishing component of the connection along the temporal (thermal) circles. We first recall the procedure in the pure gravity case (no higher spin) where the only "chemical potentials" are the temperature and the chemical potential associated with the angular momentum. We then generalize to the higher spin case. We find that there is no tension with the W N or W ∞ asymptotic algebra, which is obviously unchanged by the introduction of the chemical potentials. Our argument is not perturbative in the chemical potentials.

Field theories with anisotropic scaling in 1 + 1 dimensions are considered. It is shown that the isomorphism between Lifshitz algebras with dynamical exponents z and z −1 naturally leads to a duality between low and high temperature regimes. Assuming the existence of gap in the spectrum, this duality allows to obtain a precise formula for the asymptotic growth of the number of states with a fixed energy which depends on z and the energy of the ground state, and reduces to the Cardy formula for z = 1.The holographic realization of the duality can be naturally inferred from the fact that Euclidean Lifshitz spaces in three dimensions with dynamical exponents and characteristic lengths given by z, l, and z −1 , z −1 l, respectively, are diffeomorphic. The semiclassical entropy of black holes with Lifshitz asymptotics can then be recovered from the generalization of Cardy formula, where the ground state corresponds to a soliton. An explicit example is provided by the existence of a purely gravitational soliton solution for BHT massive gravity, which precisely has the required energy that reproduces the entropy of the analytic asymptotically Lifshitz black hole with z = 3.Remarkably, neither the asymptotic symmetries nor central charges were explicitly used in order to obtain these results.

As is well known, Kerr-Schild metrics linearize the Einstein tensor. We shall see here that they also simplify the Gauss-Bonnet tensor, which turns out to be only quadratic in the arbitrary Kerr-Schild function f when the seed metric is maximally symmetric. This property allows us to give a simple analytical expression for its trace, when the seed metric is a five-dimensional maximally symmetric spacetime in spheroidal coordinates with arbitrary parameters a and b. We also write in a (fairly) simple form the full Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet tensor (with a cosmological term) when the seed metric is flat and the oblateness parameters are equal, a = b. Armed with these results we give in a compact form the solution of the trace of the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet field equations with a cosmological term and a = b. We then examine whether this solution for the trace does solve the remaining field equations. We find that it does not in general, unless the Gauss-Bonnet coupling is such that the field equations have a unique maximally symmetric solution.