2D anti-de Sitter gravity as a conformally invariant mechanical system - art. no. 125021

We show that two-dimensional (2D) AdS gravity induces on the spacetime boun dary a conformally invariant dynamics that can be described in terms of a d e Alfaro-Fubini-Furlan model coupled to an external source with conformal d imension 2. The external source encodes information about the gauge symmetr ies of the 2D gravity system. Alternatively, there exists a description in terms of a mechanical system with anholonomic constraints. The considered s ystems are invariant under the action of the conformal group generated by a Virasoro algebra, which occurs also as an asymptotic symmetry algebra of t wo-dimensional anti-de Sitter space, We calculate the central charge of the algebra and find perfect agreement between the statistical and thermodynam ical entropies of AdS(2) black holes.