We consider AdS3 and warped AdS3 vacua in new massive gravity and study the highest weight modes and general propagating modes as a set of solutions for the linearized equations of motion. We observed that depending on the choice of gauge there are two types of solutions. We show that for warped AdS3 vacuum, the massless modes which appear only in the harmonic gauge have zero energy density and do not get higher curvature corrections. By computing the energy density it can be shown that all massive modes have negative energy density. Our computations prove that the massive modes in warped AdS3 cannot be excluded by an appropriate boundary condition and this makes the theory unstable.

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