Geometry and Physics of Null Infinity

By Abhay Ashtekar. 2014

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In asymptotically Minkowski space-times, one finds a surprisingly rich interplay between geometry and physics in both the classical and quantum regimes. On the mathematical side it involves null geometry, infinite dimensional groups, symplectic geometry on the space of gravitational connections and geometric quantization via K\"ahler structures. On the physical side, null infinity provides a natural home to study gravitational radiation and its structure leads to several interesting effects such as an infinite dimensional enlargement of the Poincar\'e group, geometrical expressions of energy and momentum carried by gravitational waves, emergence of non-trivial `vacuum configurations' and an unforeseen interplay between infrared properties of the quantum gravitational field and the enlargement of the asymptotic symmetry group. The goal of this article is to present a succinct summary of this subtle and beautiful interplay.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f19ffc99a0cb132c5603241d031daf4a76952da6

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Citations in the corpus

Symmetries and charges of general relativity at null boundaries (2018, background): “In this sense the complete intrinsic structure is universal, in the same way that an intrinsic structure of a different kind on future null infinity is universal in the BMS construction [60].”
Superboost transitions, refraction memory and super-Lorentz charge algebra (2018, methodology): “Our definition of the invariant news tensor is motivated from the structure of the vacua and differs from the one of [60, 61] defined from the “2d Weyl” tensor of Geroch [62].”
Asymptotic symmetries of gravity and soft theorems for massive particles (2015, background): “Since the seminal work of Strominger [1, 2], there has been a resurgence of interest in analyzing the role played by BMS group [3] and its various extensions [4] as symmetry group of (perturbative) Quantum Gravity S-matrix”
New symmetries for the gravitational S-matrix (2015, background): “The difficulty stem from the fact that the action of G does not preserve Ashtekar’s radiative phase space (see [21] for a recent review).”
Gravitational memory, BMS supertranslations and soft theorems (2014, unknown): “The existence of a connection between gravitational memory and BMS symmetry is known and has been discussed periodically: see for example [17,18].”