Dimensional reduction of AdS3 Chern-Simons gravity: Schwarzian and affine boundary theories

Abstract

We study a symmetry-reduced sector of $AdS_3$ gravity formulated as an $SO(2,2)$ Chern--Simons theory on a three-dimensional manifold with toroidal boundary. The reduction is implemented by requiring a global symmetry and restricting to the sector where the gauge connection is invariant along the symmetry flow. The resulting theory reduces to a two-dimensional BF-like model together with an induced one-dimensional boundary action, whose form is fixed by the three-dimensional Chern--Simons origin. On the boundary subspace selected by suitable mixed boundary conditions, the one-dimensional action reproduces the standard Drinfel'd--Sokolov restriction to coadjoint orbits of the Virasoro group, among them the Schwarzian dynamics associated with JT gravity. Moreover, the $\mathfrak{so}(2,2)$ algebra of the three-dimensional Chern--Simons model naturally generates current-dressed Kac--Moody extensions of the one-dimensional boundary dynamics. The full one dimensional boundary dynamics of the reduced theory is then shown to be compatible SYK-like tensor models with global symmetries.