Anti-de Sitter holography for gravity and higher spin theories in two dimensions

We provide a holographic description of two-dimensional dilaton gravity with anti-de Sitter boundary conditions. We find that the asymptotic symmetry algebra consists of a single copy of the Virasoro algebra with nonvanishing central charge and point out difficulties with the standard canonical treatment. We generalize our results to higher spin theories and thus provide the first examples of two-dimensional higher spin gravity with holographic description. For spin-3 gravity we find that the asymptotic symmetry algebra is a single copy of the W-3 algebra.