Symmetries and charges of general relativity at null boundaries
By Venkat Chandrasekaran, E. Flanagan, Kartik Prabhu. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2018
134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study general relativity at a null boundary using the covariant phase space formalism. We define a covariant phase space and compute the algebra of symmetries at the null boundary by considering the boundary-preserving diffeomorphisms that preserve this phase space. This algebra is the semi-direct sum of diffeomorphisms on the two sphere and a nonabelian algebra of supertranslations that has some similarities to supertranslations at null infinity. By using the general prescription developed by Wald and Zoupas, we derive the localized charges of this algebra at cross sections of the null surface as well as the associated fluxes. Our analysis is covariant and applies to general non-stationary null surfaces. We also derive the global charges that generate the symmetries for event horizons, and show that these obey the same algebra as the linearized diffeomorphisms, without any central extension. Our results show that supertranslations play an important role not just at null infinity but at all null boundaries, including non-stationary event horizons. They should facilitate further investigations of whether horizon symmetries and conservation laws in black hole spacetimes play a role in the information loss problem, as suggested by Hawking, Perry, and Strominger.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2dbc122ad0c683f6c2b579214a969286ad86c70b
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Citations in the corpus
- Carrollian physics at the black hole horizon (2019, methodology): “In some instances, the symmetry algebra will be shown to have a BMS-like structure in the sense that it includes superrotations and supertranslations on the horizon [19,20,32].”
- Carroll structures, null geometry, and conformal isometries (2019, background): “therwise arbitrary Carrollian geometries. In the literature there have been other proposals made for a notion of geometry defined on null embedded hypersurfaces, the “universal structures”, (see e.g., [15]). Different such proposals may lead to different algebras that preserve the given structure, with”