Carrollian and celestial spaces at infinity

Abstract

We show that the geometry of the asymptotic infinities of Minkowski spacetime (in $d+1$ dimensions) is captured by homogeneous spaces of the Poincaré group: the blow-ups of spatial (Spi) and timelike (Ti) infinities in the sense of Ashtekar--Hansen and a novel space Ni fibering over $\mathscr{I}$. We embed these spaces à la Penrose--Rindler into a pseudo-euclidean space of signature $(d+1,2)$ as orbits of the same Poincaré subgroup of O$(d+1,2)$. We describe the corresponding Klein pairs and determine their Poincaré-invariant structures: a carrollian structure on Ti, a pseudo-carrollian structure on Spi and a "doubly-carrollian" structure on Ni. We give additional geometric characterisations of these spaces as grassmannians of affine hyperplanes in Minkowski spacetime: Spi is the (double cover of the) grassmannian of affine lorentzian hyperplanes; Ti is the grassmannian of affine spacelike hyperplanes and Ni fibers over the grassmannian of affine null planes, which is $\mathscr{I}$. We exhibit Ni as the fibred product of $\mathscr{I}$ and the lightcone over the celestial sphere. We also show that Ni is the total space of the bundle of scales of the conformal carrollian structure on $\mathscr{I}$ and show that the symmetry algebra of its doubly-carrollian structure is isomorphic to the symmetry algebra of the conformal carrollian structure on $\mathscr{I}$; that is, the BMS algebra. We show how to reconstruct Minkowski spacetime from any of its asymptotic geometries, by establishing that points in Minkowski spacetime parametrise certain lightcone cuts in the asymptotic geometries. We include an appendix comparing with (A)dS and observe that the de Sitter groups have no homogeneous spaces which could play the rôle that the celestial sphere plays in flat space holography.