Partition functions of three-dimensional pure gravity

Abstract

The three-dimensional pure quantum gravity with a negative cosmological constant has been conjectured to be dual to an extremal conformal field theory (ECFT), of central charge c = 24k for some positive integer k. We compute the partition function of the dual ECFT by summing over gravitational instanton contributions. In particular, we conjecture an exact expression for the contribution from handlebodies to the partition function for all genera and all values of k and provide non-trivial evidences for the conjecture at genus two.