Symmetry Breaking, Central Charges and the AdS_2/CFT_1 Correspondence

When two-dimensional Anti-de Sitter space (AdS_2) is endowed with a non-constant dilaton the origin of the central charge in the Virasoro algebra generating the asymptotic symmetries of AdS_2 can be traced back to the breaking of the SL(2,R) isometry group of AdS_2. We use this fact to clarify some controversial results appeared in the literature about the value of the central charge in these models.