Pontryagin Term and Magnetic Mass in 4D AdS Gravity

Abstract

In the context of the anti-de Sitter/Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, 4D AdS gravity is suitably renormalized by adding the Gauss Bonnet term to the Einstein-Hilbert action. The subsequent addition of the Pontryagin term, with a specific coupling, allows to write the on-shell action in terms of the Weyl tensor and its dual, such that the action becomes stationary for asymptotic (anti) self-dual solutions in the Weyl tensor. The addition to the action of both topological invariants mentioned above does not modify the bulk dynamics, but it does modify the expression of the Noether current and, therefore, the conserved quantities of the theory. Here, we show that the method of Iyer and Wald leads to a fully-covariant Noether charge, which contains both the electric and magnetic parts of the Weyl tensor. For configurations which are globally (anti) self-dual in the Weyl tensor, both the action and the Noether charge identically vanish. This means that, for such spacetimes, the magnetic mass is equal to the electric mass.