Higher-curvature gravity in AdS3, holographic c-theorems, and black hole microstates

We construct higher-derivative gravity theories in three dimensions that admit holographic c-theorems and exhibit a unique maximally symmetric vacuum, at arbitrary order n in the curvature. We show that these theories exhibit special properties, the most salient ones being the decoupling of ghost modes around anti-de Sitter (AdS) space, the enhancement of symmetries at linearized level, and the existence of a oneparameter generalization of the Ba & ntilde;ados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black hole that, while being asymptotically AdS, is not of constant curvature but rather exhibits a curvature singularity. For such black holes, we provide a holographic derivation of their thermodynamics. This gives a microscopic picture of black hole thermodynamics for nonsupersymmetric solutions, of nonconstant curvature in higher-derivative theories of arbitrary order in the curvature.