Claudio Bunster

Generalized Black Holes in Three-dimensional Spacetime

A bstractThree-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,

Monopoles for gravitation and for higher spin fields

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Gravitational Electric-Magnetic Duality, Gauge Invariance and Twisted Self-Duality

). 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,

Sp(2n;R) electric-magnetic duality as off-shell symmetry of interacting electromagnetic and scalar fields

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Can (Electric-Magnetic) Duality Be Gauged?

) by sl (3,

Superselection rule for the cosmological constant in three-dimensional spacetime

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A Monopole Near a Black Hole

) or, more generally, by sl (N,

Extended Charged Events and Chern-Simons Couplings

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Dynamics of charged events

). The asymptotic symmetries are then two copies of the so-called WN 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 WN 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,

Gravitational domain walls and the dynamics of the gravitational constant G

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