Magnetic mass in 4D AdS gravity

Abstract

We provide a fully covariant expression for the diffeomorphic charge in four-dimensional anti-de Sitter gravity, when the Gauss-Bonnet and Pontryagin terms are added to the action. The couplings of these topological invariants are such that the Weyl tensor and its dual appear in the on-shell variation of the action and such that the action is stationary for asymptotic (anti-)self-dual solutions in the Weyl tensor. In analogy with Euclidean electromagnetism, whenever the self-duality condition is global, both the action and the total charge are identically vanishing. Therefore, for such configurations, the magnetic mass equals the Ashtekhar-Magnon-Das definition.