What is a chiral 2d CFT? And what does it have to do with extremal black holes?

The near horizon limit of the extremal BTZ black hole is a "self-dual orbifold" of AdS(3). This geometry has a null circle on its boundary, and thus the dual field theory is a Discrete Light Cone Quantized (DLCQ) two dimensional CFT. The same geometry can be compactified to two dimensions giving AdS(2) with a constant electric field. The kinematics of the DLCQ show that in a consistent quantum theory of gravity in these backgrounds there can be no dynamics in AdS(2), which is consistent with older ideas about instabilities in this space. We show how the necessary boundary conditions eliminating AdS(2) fluctuations can be implemented, leaving one copy of a Virasoro algebra as the asymptotic symmetry group. Our considerations clarify some aspects of the chiral CFTs appearing in proposed dual descriptions of the near-horizon degrees of freedom of extremal black holes.