Cosmological Topologically Massive Gravitons and Photons

Understand

We study topologically massive (2+1)-dimensional gravity with a negative cosmological constant.

• The masses of the linearized curvature excitations about AdS_3 backgrounds are not only shifted from their flat background values but, more surprisingly, split according to chirality.
• For all finite values of the topological mass, we find a single bulk degree of freedom with positive energy, and exhibit a complete set of normalizable, finite-energy wave packet solutions.
• This model can also be written as a sum of two higher-derivative SL(2,R) Chern--Simons theories, weighted by the central charges of the boundary conformal field theory.