Canonical Structure of New Massive Gravity

Full text: We construct the first-order Lagrangian for new massive gravity (NMG) and use the covariant expression for the conserved charges proposed by Nester to calculate the energy and angular momentum of the maximally symmetric solution. We use the full power of Dirac's method for constrained Hamiltonian systems to show that the dimension of the physical phase space is four per spacetime point, which corresponds to two Lagrangian degree of freedom. The analysis of the AdS asymptotic region confirms that the asymptotic symmetry is described by two independent Virasoro algebras with classical central charges. (author)