BMS supertranslations and Weinberg’s soft graviton theorem

By T. He, V. Lysov, P. Mitra, Andrew Strominger. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2014

766 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently it was conjectured that a certain infinite-dimensional “diagonal” subgroup of BMS supertranslations acting on past and future null infinity ( and ) is an exact symmetry of the quantum gravity S-matrix, and an associated Ward identity was derived. In this paper we show that this supertranslation Ward identity is precisely equivalent to Weinberg’s soft graviton theorem. Along the way we construct the canonical generators of supertranslations at , including the relevant soft graviton contributions. Boundary conditions at the past and future of and a correspondingly modified Dirac bracket are required. The soft gravitons enter as boundary modes and are manifestly the Goldstone bosons of spontaneously broken supertranslation invariance.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ddac0bba375a507b23958e4a51769668ea102842

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Citations in the corpus

Superrotation charge and supertranslation hair on black holes (2016, background): “it does not map the phase space considered in [3] into itself.”
Celestial amplitudes and conformal soft theorems (2019, background): “limit of momentum space graviton amplitudes. 4 AsymptoticSymmetries at I The relationship between energetic soft limits and asymptotic symmetries of gauge theory and gravity is well-established (cf., [41, 48, 49]). A similar relationship has been suggested 2We thank Alfredo Guevara [47] for pointing”
Holographic symmetry algebras for gauge theory and gravity (2021, background): “Only very recently [3,4], using soft theorems from quantum field theory, was it shown that there are an infinite number of non-trivial symmetries of GR with associated conserved charges.”
Conformally soft photons and gravitons (2018, background): “One of them is the ∆ → 1 limit of the conformal primary wavefunction h which becomes a pure diffeomorphism that can be recognized as the antipodally matched supertranslation of [15, 28].”
Soft sub-leading divergences in Yang-Mills amplitudes (2014, unknown): “Recently soft limits have been investigated from the point of view of asymptotic symmetries of flat space [1, 2, 3], in particular Weinberg’s soft graviton theorem has been derived from the action of the super-translations of the BMS group on the gravitational S-matrix.”
Evidence for a New Soft Graviton Theorem (2014, methodology): “A short calculation gives S((1))M (12) 4 = 1 |123|2 [5, 3][5, 4]〈3, 1〉〈3, 2〉〈5, 3〉〈5, 4〉〈4, 1〉〈4, 2〉 (56) We choose to use S with reference spinors x = 1 and y = 2, i.”
Higher-Dimensional Supertranslations and Weinberg's Soft Graviton Theorem (2015, methodology): “In [8] it was further demonstrated that the Ward identity associated to this diagonal supertranslation invariance of the gravitational S-matrix is equivalent to Weinberg’s soft graviton theorem [9].”
Lectures on the Infrared Structure of Gravity and Gauge Theory (2017, methodology): “15) was proven [43] to be implicit to all orders in standard weak field perturbation theory by demonstrating its equivalence to Weinberg’s soft graviton theorem [7].”
2D Kac-Moody symmetry of 4D Yang-Mills theory (2015, background): “The asymptotic symmetries of gravity (or QED) are spontaneously broken in the perturbative vacuum and the soft gravitons (or photons) were shown to be the resulting Goldstone bosons [7,8,10].”