Zooming in on AdS 3 /CFT 2 near a BPS bound

Any (d + 1)-dimensional CFT with a U(1) flavor symmetry, a BPS bound and an exactly marginal coupling admits a decoupling limit in which one zooms in on the spectrum close to the bound. This limit is an Inonu-Wigner contraction of so(2, d+1)⊕u(1) that leads to a relativistic algebra with a scaling generator but no conformal generators. In 2D CFTs, Lorentz boosts are abelian and by adding a second u(1) we find a contraction of two copies of sl(2, ℝ) ⊕ u(1) to two copies of P 2 , the 2-dimensional centrally extended Poincare algebra. We show that the bulk is described by a novel non-Lorentzian geometry that we refer to as pseudo-Newton-Cartan geometry. Both the Chern-Simons action on sl(2, ℝ) ⊕ u(1) and the entire phase space of asymptotically AdS3 spacetimes are well-behaved in the corresponding limit if we fix the radial component for the u(1) connection. With this choice, the resulting Newton-Cartan foliation structure is now associated not with time, but with the emerging holographic direction. Since the leaves of this foliation do not mix, the emergence of the holographic direction is much simpler than in AdS3 holography. Furthermore, we show that the asymptotic symmetry algebra of the limit theory consists of a left- and a right-moving warped Virasoro algebra.