arXiv subjects

Samuel Blitz

Publications and source records attributed to Samuel Blitz.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Potential Carroll Structures and Special Carrollian Manifolds

It is well-known that unlike space-like and time-like hypersurfaces, null hypersurfaces in Lorentzian manifolds do not naturally inherit an affine connection from the spacetime in which they are embedded. On the other hand, recent developments in flat-space holography motivate the study of the intrinsic geometry of null hypersurfaces such as null infinity and black hole event horizons. Here we initiate the study of potential Carroll structures, a candidate for an intrinsic description of null hypersurfaces which may be particularly useful in settings where conformal isometries are of interest, and we explore their relationship to another such candidate intrinsic geometry, the special Carrollian manifolds.

math.DG↗

arXiv2026

Einstein and Yang-Mills implies conformal Yang-Mills

There exist conformally invariant, higher-derivative, variational analogs of the Yang-Mills condition for connections on vector bundles over a conformal manifold of even dimension greater than or equal to six. We give a compact formula for these analogs and prove that they are a strict weakening of the Yang-Mills condition with respect to an Einstein metric. We also show that the conformal Yang-Mills condition for the tractor connection of an even dimensional conformal manifold is equivalent to vanishing of its Fefferman-Graham obstruction tensor. This result uses that the tractor connection on a Poincar\'e-Einstein manifold is itself Yang-Mills.

math.DG↗

arXiv2025

Conformal hypersurface invariants and Bach-type Boundary Problems

Using variational considerations, we establish that there exists a new symmetric trace-free tensor conformal invariant of hypersurfaces embeddings in even dimensional conformal manifolds. This conformal invariant completes the family of conformal invariants known as conformal fundamental forms. The object has important links to global problems. In the context of the even dimensional boundary-value Poincar\'e--Einstein problem, the image of the Dirichlet--to--Neumann map is conformally invariant. Recent investigations established that this image is the pullback of a particular Riemannian invariant to the odd-dimensional boundary. We show here that, in fact, that image arises as the restriction of the new conformal invariant constructed here. As a consequence of the proof, we are able to construct several new global conformal invariants of the boundary. Finally, we use our variational results to establish that compact Bach-flat manifolds with umbilic boundary must admit a (formal to all orders) Poincar\'e--Einstein metric in the conformal class of its interior.

math.DG↗

arXiv2025

Non-existence of higher-order conformal fundamental forms in odd dimensions

Conformal fundamental forms populate a minimal generating set for low differential order invariants of conformal hypersurface embeddings. In this work we complete the characterization of conformal fundamental forms by proving the general non-existence of higher-order conformal fundamental forms when the embedded hypersurface is even dimensional.

math.DG↗

arXiv2025

A Breathing Universe is Consistent

We consider a toy FRW universe with the exotic topology $S^1 \times S^3$. We show that for a specific choice of quantum field content, the semi-classical Friedman equations are consistent with temporal periodicity as required by the $S^1$ timelike factor. A straightforward consequence is that entropy reversals occur during each cycle, consistent with Hawking's proposed connection between the thermodynamic and cosmological arrows of time.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2025

Asymptotia of Kerr-de Sitter Black Holes

Exterior geometries of physical black holes are believed to asymptotically approach the Kerr--de Sitter spacetime at late times. A characteristic feature of that vacuum Einstein solution is the presence of a hidden symmetry generated by a closed conformal Killing--Yano tensor. Using this symmetry and modern conformal geometry technology, we find necessary conditions for generic solutions to asymptotically approach the Kerr--de Sitter metric. Further, we constrain the admissible form of the geometric free data on the conformal infinity giving rise to this family of spacetimes and constrain it in terms of the stress-energy tensor.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2024

A long freeze is hard to achieve in the presence of matter

Certain holographic dark energy (HDE) models allow for the possibility of a ``long freeze,'' in which the scale factor evolves to a constant in the long-time limit. Here we extend previous calculations by adding a nonrelativistic matter component. The addition of a matter component tends to destroy the long freeze behavior, driving the universe to recollapse. Long freeze evolution is still possible, but only for a limited set of HDE models.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2024

Higher Fundamental Forms and Warped Product Hypersurfaces

Warped products are one of the simplest families of Riemannian manifolds that can have non-trivial geometries. In this article, we characterize the geometry of hypersurface embeddings arising from warped product manifolds using the language of higher (Riemannian) fundamental forms. In a similar vein, we also study the geometry of conformal manifolds with embedded hypersurfaces that admits a trivialization of the conformal metric to a product metric, with base manifold given by the embedded hypersurface. We show that the higher conformal fundamental forms play a critical role in their characterization.

math.DG↗

arXiv2024

The long freeze: an asymptotically static universe from holographic dark energy

We show that some holographic dark energy models can lead to a future evolution of the universe in which the scale factor $a$ is asymptotically constant, while $\dot a \rightarrow 0$ and the corresponding energy and pressure densities also vanish. We provide specific examples of such models and general conditions that can lead to an asymptotically static universe, which we have called the ``long freeze." In some cases, such evolution can follow an arbitrarily long exponential expansion essentially identical to the asymptotic evolution of $\Lambda$CDM. When nonrelativistic matter is added to the holographic dark energy, it tends to destroy the long freeze behavior, driving the universe to recollapse. We show that a long freeze evolution is still possible, but only for a more limited set of HDE models.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

Curvature fluctuations in a baby quantum gravity model

Understanding the microscopic behavior of spacetime is critical for developing a theory of quantum gravity and perhaps solving the cosmological constant problem. In this context, it has been proposed that the quantity of interest is the quantum uncertainty in the Ricci scalar and here we investigate this for a discrete baby quantum gravity model based a single square cell. We find that the averaged Ricci scalar vanishes to leading order but has UV-divergent fluctuations. While this behavior is stable under renormalization, it appears not to be under the introduction of a small cosmological constant.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2024

Holography of Higher Codimension Submanifolds: Riemannian and Conformal

We provide a natural generalization to submanifolds of the holographic method used to extract higher-order local invariants of both Riemannian and conformal embeddings, some of which depend on a choice of parallelization of the normal bundle. Qualitatively new behavior is observed in the higher-codimension case, giving rise to new invariants that obstruct the order-by-order construction of unit defining maps. In the conformal setting, a novel invariant (that vanishes in codimension 1) is realized as the leading transverse-order term appearing in a holographically-constructed Willmore invariant. Using these same tools, we also investigate the formal solutions to extension problems off of an embedded submanifold.

math.DG↗

arXiv2023

Horizons that Gyre and Gimble: A Differential Characterization of Null Hypersurfaces

Motivated by the thermodynamics of black hole solutions conformal to stationary solutions, we study the geometric invariant theory of null hypersurfaces. It is well-known that a null hypersurface in a Lorentzian manifold can be treated as a Carrollian geometry. Additional structure can be added to this geometry by choosing a connection which yields a Carrollian manifold. In the literature various authors have introduced Koszul connections to study the study the physics on these hypersurfaces. In this paper we examine the various Carrollian geometries and their relationship to null hypersurface embeddings. We specify the geometric data required to construct a rigid Carrollian geometry, and we argue that a connection with torsion is the most natural object to study Carrollian manifolds. We then use this connection to develop a hypersurface calculus suitable for a study of intrinsic and extrinsic differential invariants on embedded null hypersurfaces; motivating examples are given, including geometric invariants preserved under conformal transformations.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2023

The Dirichlet-to-Neumann Map for Poincar\'e-Einstein Fillings

We study the non-linear Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for the Poincar\'e-Einstein filling problem. For even dimensional manifolds the range of this non-local map is described in terms of a rank two "Dirichlet-to Neumann tensor" along the boundary determined by the Poincar\'e-Einstein metric. This tensor is proportional to the variation of renormalized volume along a path of Poincar\'e-Einstein metrics. We construct natural "Dirichlet-to-Neumann hypersurface invariants" that are conformally invariant and recover all Dirichlet-to-Neumann tensors. We give an explicit formula for these hypersurface invariants and use a new vanishing result for odd order $T$-curvatures to show that they are the unique, natural conformal hypersurface invariant of transverse order equaling the boundary dimension. We also construct such conformally invariant Dirichlet-to-Neumann hypersurface invariants for Poincar\'e-Einstein fillings for odd dimensional manifolds with conformally flat boundary.

math.DG↗

arXiv2022

Toward a Classification of Conformal Hypersurface Invariants

Hypersurfaces embedded in conformal manifolds appear frequently as boundary data in boundary-value problems in cosmology and string theory. Viewed as the non-null conformal infinity of a spacetime, we consider hypersurfaces embedded in a Riemannian (or Lorentzian) conformal manifold. We construct a finite and minimal family of hypersurface tensors -- the curvatures intrinsic to the hypersurface and the so-called ``conformal fundamental forms'' -- that can be used to construct natural conformal invariants of the hypersurface embedding up to a fixed order in hypersurface-orthogonal derivatives of the bulk metric. We thus show that these conformal fundamental forms capture the extrinsic embedding data of a conformal infinity in a spacetime.

math.DG↗

arXiv2021

A Sharp Characterization of the Willmore Invariant

First introduced to describe surfaces embedded in $\mathbb{R}^3$, the Willmore invariant is a conformally-invariant extrinsic scalar curvature of a surface that vanishes when the surface minimizes bending and stretching. Both this invariant and its higher dimensional analogs appear frequently in the study of conformal geometric systems. To that end, we provide a characterization of the Willmore invariant in general dimensions. In particular, we provide a sharp sufficient condition for the vanishing of the Willmore invariant and show that in even dimensions it can be described fully using conformal fundamental forms and one additional tensor.

math.DG↗

arXiv2021

Generalized Willmore Energies, Q-Curvatures, Extrinsic Paneitz Operators, and Extrinsic Laplacian Powers

Over forty years ago, Paneitz, and independently Fradkin and Tseytlin, discovered a fourth-order conformally-invariant differential operator, intrinsically defined on a conformal manifold, mapping scalars to scalars. This operator is a special case of the so-termed extrinsic Paneitz operator defined in the case when the conformal manifold is itself a conformally embedded hypersurface. In particular, this encodes the obstruction to smoothly solving the five-dimensional scalar Laplace equation, and suitable higher dimensional analogs, on conformally compact structures with constant scalar curvature. Moreover, the extrinsic Paneitz operator can act on tensors of general type by dint of being defined on tractor bundles. Motivated by a host of applications, we explicitly compute the extrinsic Paneitz operator. We apply this formula to obtain: an extrinsically-coupled Q-curvature for embedded four-manifolds, the anomaly in renormalized volumes for conformally compact five-manifolds with negative constant scalar curvature, Willmore energies for embedded four-manifolds, the local obstruction to smoothly solving the five-dimensional singular Yamabe problem, and new extrinsically-coupled fourth and sixth order operators for embedded surfaces and four-manifolds, respectively.

math.DG↗

arXiv2021

Conformal Fundamental Forms and the Asymptotically Poincar\'e--Einstein Condition

An important problem is to determine under which circumstances a metric on a conformally compact manifold is conformal to a Poincar\'e--Einstein metric. Such conformal rescalings are in general obstructed by conformal invariants of the boundary hypersurface embedding, the first of which is the trace-free second fundamental form and then, at the next order, the trace-free Fialkow tensor. We show that these tensors are the lowest order examples in a sequence of conformally invariant higher fundamental forms determined by the data of a conformal hypersurface embedding. We give a construction of these canonical extrinsic curvatures. Our main result is that the vanishing of these fundamental forms is a necessary and sufficient condition for a conformally compact metric to be conformally related to an asymptotically Poincar\'e--Einstein metric. More generally, these higher fundamental forms are basic to the study of conformal hypersurface invariants. Because Einstein metrics necessarily have constant scalar curvature, our method employs asymptotic solutions of the singular Yamabe problem to select an asymptotically distinguished conformally compact metric. Our approach relies on conformal tractor calculus as this is key for an extension of the general theory of conformal hypersurface embeddings that we further develop here. In particular, we give in full detail tractor analogs of the classical Gauss Formula and Gauss Theorem for Riemannian hypersurface embeddings.

math.DG↗

arXiv2017

Holographic Entropy Cone Measures

We investigate numerically several proxy measures for the number of states contained within the holographic entropy cone, compared to the number contained within the quantum entropy cone, for states with $3$ and $4$ parties. We find an interesting tension: while measures focused on calculating the volume ratios between the two cones indicate that the quantum cone is much larger than the holographic one, measures based on the generation of random states and then calculating the entropies thereof imply that almost all such randomly generated states are also contained within the holographic entropy cone. Also interestingly, the volume measures strongly indicate a difference in the number of states within the quantum or stabiliser cones versus the number in the holographic cone, which is not reproduced by the other classes of measures. We comment on the difference between the two classes of measures, and why each may be preferable.

hep-th↗