Conserved charges for even dimensional asymptotically AdS gravity theories- art. no. 044002

Mass and other conserved Noether charges are discussed for solutions of gra vity theories with locally anti-de Sitter (AdS) asymptotics in 2n dimension s. The action is supplemented with a boundary term whose purpose is to guar antee that it reaches an extremum on the classical solutions, provided the space-time is locally AdS space-time at the boundary. It is also shown that if space-time is locally AdS at spatial infinity, the conserved charges ar e finite and properly normalized without requiring subtraction of a referen ce background, In this approach, Noether charges associated with Lorentz an d diffeomorphism invariance vanish identically for constant curvature space -times. The case of a zero cosmological constant is obtained as a limit of AdS space-time, where Lambda plays the role of a regulator.