Consistent sphere reductions of gravity to two dimensions

Abstract: Consistent reductions of higher-dimensional (matter-coupled) gravity theories on spheres have been constructed and classified in an important paper by Cveti\v{c}, L\"u and Pope. We close a gap in the classification and study the case when the resulting lower-dimensional theory is two-dimensional. We construct the consistent reduction of Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton gravity on a $d$-sphere $S^d$ to two-dimensional dilaton-gravity coupled to a gauged sigma model with target space ${\rm SL}(d+1)/{\rm SO}(d+1)$. The truncation contains solutions of type AdS$_2\times \Sigma_d$ where the internal space $\Sigma_d$ is a deformed sphere. In particular, the construction includes the consistent truncation around the near-horizon geometry of the boosted Kerr string. In turn, we find that an AdS$_2\times S^d$ background with the round $S^d$ within a consistent truncation requires $d>3$ and an additional cosmological term in the higher-dimensional theory.