The Radiative Phase Space for the Dynamical Celestial Metric

Abstract

Generalized BMS (gBMS) is the Lie group of the asymptotic symmetries at null infinity, and is proposed to be a symmetry of the quantum S-matrix. Despite much progress in understanding the symplectic structure at null infinity consistent with the gBMS symmetries, the construction of a radiative phase space where all the physical soft modes and their conjugate partners are identified remains elusive. We construct just such a radiative phase space for linearized gravity by a systematic constraint analysis. In addition, we highlight the difficulties that arise in extending this analysis to the non-linear case. In order to analyze the difficulties we face in extending these ideas to the non-linear setting, we consider a toy model in which we gauge the action of the Weyl scaling in the Weyl BMS group. We find that supertranslations are no longer well-defined symmetries on the reduced phase space of the gauged Weyl, as Weyl scalings do not commute with supertranslations. In this restricted case we obtain the symplectic form and derive the reduced phase space.