Asymptotically flat structure of hypergravity in three spacetime dimensions

Abstract

The asymptotic structure of three-dimensional hypergravity without cosmological constant is analyzed. In the case of gravity minimally coupled to a spin-$5/2$ field, a consistent set of boundary conditions is proposed, being wide enough so as to accommodate a generic choice of chemical potentials associated to the global charges. The algebra of the canonical generators of the asymptotic symmetries is given by a hypersymmetric nonlinear extension of BMS$_{3}$. It is shown that the asymptotic symmetry algebra can be recovered from a subset of a suitable limit of the direct sum of the W$_{\left(2,4\right)}$ algebra with its hypersymmetric extension. The presence of hypersymmetry generators allows to construct bounds for the energy, which turn out to be nonlinear and saturate for spacetimes that admit globally-defined "Killing vector-spinors". The null orbifold or Minkowski spacetime can then be seen as the corresponding ground state in the case of fermions that fulfill periodic or anti-periodic boundary conditions, respectively. The hypergravity theory is also explicitly extended so as to admit parity-odd terms in the action. It is then shown that the asymptotic symmetry algebra includes an additional central charge, being proportional to the coupling of the Lorentz-Chern-Simons form. The generalization of these results in the case of gravity minimally coupled to arbitrary half-integer spin fields is also carried out. The hypersymmetry bounds are found to be given by a suitable polynomial of degree $s+\frac{1}{2}$ in the energy, where $s$ is the spin of the fermionic generators.