English

Phase Space Renormalization and Finite BMS Charges in Six Dimensions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2023-11-27 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We perform a complete and systematic analysis of the solution space of six-dimensional Einstein gravity. We show that a particular subclass of solutions -- those that are analytic near I+\mathcal{I}^+ -- admit a non-trivial action of the generalised Bondi-Metzner-van der Burg-Sachs (GBMS) group which contains \emph{infinite-dimensional} supertranslations and superrotations. The latter consists of all smooth volume-preserving Diff×\timesWeyl transformations of the celestial S4S^4. Using the covariant phase space formalism and a new technique which we develop in this paper (phase space renormalization), we are able to renormalize the symplectic potential using counterterms which are \emph{local} and \emph{covariant}. The Hamiltonian charges corresponding to GBMS diffeomorphisms are non-integrable. We show that the integrable part of these charges faithfully represent the GBMS algebra and in doing so, settle a long-standing open question regarding the existence of infinite-dimensional asymptotic symmetries in higher even dimensional non-linear gravity. Finally, we show that the semi-classical Ward identities for supertranslations and superrotations are precisely the leading and subleading soft-graviton theorems respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.09330,
  title  = {Phase Space Renormalization and Finite BMS Charges in Six Dimensions},
  author = {Federico Capone and Prahar Mitra and Aaron Poole and Bilyana Tomova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.09330},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

79 pages, 1 figure, typos corrected, section 8 expanded, some references and remarks added, published version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:10:25.665Z