Quantisation of 2D- gravity with Weyl and area- preserving diffeomorphism invariances

The constraint structure of the induced 2D-gravity with the Weyl and area-preserving diffeomorphism invariances is analysed in the ADM formulation. It is found that when the area-preserving diffeomorphism constraints are kept, the usual conformal gauge does not exist, whereas there is the possibility to choose the so-called “quasi-light-cone” gauge, in which besides the area-preserving diffeomorphism invariance, the reduced Lagrangian also possesses the SL(2, R) residual symmetry. This observation indicates that the claimed correspondence between the SL(2, R) residual symmetry and the area-preserving diffeomorphism invariance in both regularisation approaches does not hold. The string-like approach is then applied to quantise this model, but a fictitious non-zero central charge in the Virasoro algebra appears. When a set of gauge-independent SL(2, R) current-like fields is introduced instead of the string-like variables, a consistent quantum theory is obtained, which means that the area-preserving diffeomorphism invariance can be maintained at the quantum level.