Quantized Einstein-Rosen waves, AdS2, and spontaneous symmetry breaking
Abstract
4D cylindrical gravitational waves with aligned polarizations (Einstein-Rosen waves) are shown to be described by a weight 1/2 massive free field on the double cover of AdS2. Thorn's C-energy is one of the sl(2,R) generators, the reconstruction from the (timelike) symmetry axis is the CFT1 holography. Classically the phase space is also invariant under a O(1,1) group action on the metric coefficients that is a remnant of the original 4D diffeomorphism invariance. In the quantum theory this symmetry is found to be spontaneously broken while the AdS2 conformal invariance remains intact.
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