Asymptotic dynamics of three dimensional supergravity and higher spin gravity revisited

Abstract: We reconsider the Hamiltonian reduction of the action for three dimensional AdS supergravity and $W_3$ higher spin AdS gravity in the Chern-Simons formulation under asymptotically anti-de Sitter boundary conditions. We show that the reduction gives two copies of chiral bosons on the boundary. In particular, we take into account the holonomy of the Chern-Simons connection which manifests itself as zero mode of the momentum of the boundary chiral boson. We provide an equivalent formulation of the boundary action which we claim to be the geometric action on symplectic leaves of a (super-)Virasoro or a higher spin $W_N$ Poisson manifold in the case of supergravity or higher spin gravity respectively, where the intersection of leaves (given in terms of leaves representatives) can be identified as the bulk holonomy. This concludes the extension to non-linear algebras where the notion of coadjoint representation is not well-defined. The boundary Hamiltonian depends on a choice of boundary conditions and is equivalent to the Schwarzian action for corresponding Brown-Henneaux boundary conditions. We make this connection explicit in the extended supersymmetric case. Moreover, we discuss the geometric action in the case of $W_3$ AdS$_3$ gravity in both $\mathfrak{sl}(3)$ highest weight representations based on principal and diagonal $\mathfrak{sl}(2)$ embeddings.