Chiral boundary conditions for singletons and W-branes

Abstract

We revisit the holographic dictionary for a free massless scalar in AdS3, focusing on the ‘singleton’ solutions for which the boundary profile is an arbitrary chiral function. We look for consistent boundary conditions which include this class of solutions. On one hand, we give a no-go argument that they cannot be interpreted within any boundary condition which preserves full conformal invariance. On the other hand, we show that such solutions fit naturally in a generalization of the Compère-Song-Strominger boundary conditions, which preserve a chiral Virasoro and current algebra. These observations have implications for the black hole deconstruction proposal, which proposes singleton solutions as candidate black hole microstate geometries. Our results suggest that the chiral boundary condition, which also contains the extremal BTZ black hole, is the natural setting for holographically interpreting the black hole deconstruction proposal.