Conserved gravitational charges, locality and the holographic Weyl anomaly - a fresh viewpoint

Abstract

Since the proposal of the AdS/CFT correspondence, made by Maldacena and Witten, there has been some controversy about the definition of conserved Noether charges associated to asymptotic isometries in asymptotically AdS spacetimes, namely, whether they form an anomalous (i.e., a nontrivial central extension) representation of the Lie algebra of the conformal group in odd bulk dimensions or not. In the present work, we shall review the derivation of these charges by using covariant phase space techniques, emphasizing the principle of locality underlying it. We shall also comment on how these issues manifest themselves in the quantum setting.