English

Asymptotic structure of $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity in 3D: extended super-BMS$_3$ and nonlinear energy bounds

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-10-11 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

The asymptotically flat structure of N=(2,0)\mathcal{N}=(2,0) supergravity in three spacetime dimensions is explored. The asymptotic symmetries are spanned by an extension of the super-BMS3_3 algebra, with two independent u^(1)\hat{u}(1) currents of electric and magnetic type. These currents are associated to U(1)U(1) fields being even and odd under parity, respectively. Remarkably, although the U(1)U(1) fields do not generate a backreaction on the metric, they provide nontrivial Sugawara-like contributions to the BMS3_3 generators, and hence to the energy and the angular momentum. The entropy of flat cosmological spacetimes with U(1)U(1) fields then acquires a nontrivial dependence on the u^(1)\hat{u}(1) charges. If the spin structure is odd, the ground state corresponds to Minkowski spacetime, and although the anticommutator of the canonical supercharges is linear in the energy and in the electric-like u^(1)\hat{u}(1) charge, the energy becomes bounded from below by the energy of the ground state shifted by the square of the electric-like u^(1)\hat{u}(1) charge. If the spin structure is even, the same bound for the energy generically holds, unless the absolute value of the electric-like charge is less than minus the mass of Minkowski spacetime in vacuum, so that the energy has to be nonnegative. The explicit form of the Killing spinors is found for a wide class of configurations that fulfills our boundary conditions, and they exist precisely when the corresponding bounds are saturated. It is also shown that the spectra with periodic or antiperiodic boundary conditions for the fermionic fields are related by spectral flow, in a similar way as it occurs for the N=2\mathcal{N}=2 super-Virasoro algebra. Indeed, our super-BMS3_3 algebra can be recovered from the flat limit of the superconformal algebra with N=(2,2)\mathcal{N}=(2,2), truncating the fermionic generators of the right copy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.07542,
  title  = {Asymptotic structure of $\mathcal{N}=2$ supergravity in 3D: extended super-BMS$_3$ and nonlinear energy bounds},
  author = {Oscar Fuentealba and Javier Matulich and Ricardo Troncoso},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07542},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

32 pages, no figures. Talk given at the ESI Programme and Workshop "Quantum Physics and Gravity" hosted by ESI, Vienna, June 2017. V3: minor changes and typos corrected. Matches published version