Chiral Topologically Massive Gravity and Extremal B-F Scalars

Abstract

At a critical ``chiral'' coupling, topologically massive gravity with a negative cosmological constant exhibits several unusual features, including the emergence of a new logarithmic branch of solutions and a linearization instability for certain boundary conditions. I show that at this coupling, the linearized theory may be parametrized by a free scalar field at the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound, and use this description to investigate these features.