Canonical analysis of cosmological topologically massive gravity at the chiral point

Understand

Wolfgang Kummer was a pioneer of two-dimensional gravity and a strong advocate of the first order formulation in terms of Cartan variables.

• In the present work we apply Wolfgang Kummer's philosophy, the `Vienna School approach', to a specific three-dimensional model of gravity, cosmological topologically massive gravity at the chiral point.
• Exploiting a new Chern-Simons representation we perform a canonical analysis.
• The dimension of the physical phase space is two per point, and thus the theory exhibits a local physical degree of freedom, the topologically massive graviton.