Critical points of warped and higher-curvature gravity
Gerónimo Caselli (Departamento de Física, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Av. Pellegrini 250, Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina); Gaston Giribet (Department of Physics, New York University. 726 Broadway, New York, New York 10003, USA); Andrés Goya (Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio, Ciudad Universitaria, Casilla de Correo 67, Sucursal 28, 1428, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Warped anti-de Sitter (WAdS)/warped conformal field theory (WCFT) correspondence is an interesting realization of non-AdS holography. It relates three-dimensional warped anti-de Sitter () spaces to a special class of two-dimensional quantum field theory with chiral scaling symmetry that acts only on right-moving modes. The latter are often called warped conformal field theories (), and their existence makes WAdS/WCFT particularly interesting as a tool to investigate a new type of two-dimensional conformal structure. Besides, WAdS/WCFT is interesting because it enables one to apply holographic techniques to the microstate counting problem of non-AdS, nonsupersymmetric black holes. Asymptotically black holes () appear as solutions of topologically massive theories, Chern-Simons theories, and many other models. Here, we explore solutions of -dimensional higher-curvature gravity, with being different internal manifolds, typically given by products of deformations of hyperbolic spaces, although we also consider warped products with time-dependent deformations. These geometries are solutions of the second order higher-curvature theory at special (critical) points of the parameter space, where the theory exhibits a sort of degeneracy. We argue that the dual (W)CFT at those points is actually trivial. In many respects, these critical points of vacua are the squashed/stretched analogs of the Chern-Simons point of Lovelock gravity.