We present a coordinate-free background space construction of Euclidean Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity. It is written as a gauge theory obtained from the Killing vectors and conformal Killing vectors of a hyperboloid embedded in a three-dimensional background. A novel feature of the gauge theory is that vanishing field strength does not necessarily imply that the gauge potentials (written in the embedding space) are pure gauges, not even locally. On the other hand, the projection of the potentials along the hyperboloid are pure gauges, as is the case in the standard approach. As is usual, metric tensors are dynamically generated from the classical solutions of the theory, which here do not rely on coordinate charts on the two-dimensional surface. We find a special class of solutions whereby the derived metric tensor on the surface is the induced metric from the background space. The gauge theory construction given here has a natural generalization to a noncommutative space, which does not require the use of coordinates, symbols, or a star product. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
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