Canonical structure of topologically massive gravity with a cosmological constant

Understand

We study the canonical structure of three-dimensional topologically massive gravity with a cosmological constant, using the full power of Dirac's method for constrained Hamiltonian systems.

• It is found that the dimension of the physical phase space is two per spacetime point, which corresponds to a single Lagrangian degree of freedom.
• The analysis of the AdS asymptotic region reveals a remarkable relation to 3D gravity with torsion: in the limit of vanishing torsion, the conserved charges and asymptotic symmetries of the two theories become identical.