Conference

In the last few years, various authors have extended the covariant phase space to include arbitrary anomalies, and a notion of improved Noether charge. After reviewing this construction and discussing examples of anomalies, I will point out that the covariance requirements of the seminal Wald-Zoupas paper permit the presence of a special class of anomalies. To illustrate the meaning of such anomalies, one can look at the case of future null infinity where they take the form of the soft terms in the flux-balance laws.

In this talk, I will discuss certain homogeneous spaces of the Poincaré group that correspond to the well-known asymptotic regions of asymptotically flat spacetimes: time-, space-, and light-like infinity. I will then show that all of these spaces admit a uniform description as surfaces embedded in a higher-dimensional space. I will conclude with some comments concerning the computation of correlators of conformal carrollian theories from this embedding space picture.

In this talk I will explore the role of the boundary Cotton tensor in the reconstruction of the solution space of four-dimensional asymptotically AdS and mostly asymptotically flat spacetimes. I will discuss charges from a purely boundary perspective, which emerge in sets of electric and magnetic towers, not necessarily conserved and possibly including subleading components.

On Tuesday, M. Schiavina laid out the theoretical framework for the symplectic reduction of gauge theories in the presence of corners. In this talk I will apply this theoretical framework to Yang-Mills theory on a null boundary and show how a pair of soft charges controls the residual (corner) gauge symmetry after the first-stage symplectic reduction, and therefore the superselection structure of the theory after the second-stage symplectic reduction. I will also discuss the subtleties of the gauge A_u = 0, the interpretation of electromagnetic memory as superselection, and how the nonlinear structure of the non-Abelian theory complicates this picture.

After reviewing the constrained Hamiltonian analysis of geometric actions, the construction is applied to the case of the BMS group in four dimensions, where it yields two plus one dimensional BMS4 invariant field theories. (Based on work done in collaboration with K. Nguyen and R. Ruzziconi)

This talk focuses on classical features of asymptotic QED, i.e. the limit of QED at null and time-like infinity. The BV-BFV formalism allows one to view this as a boundary theory of bulk QED and carries a natural notion of what it means to be a symmetry of the model. I will make the connection between this perspective and the earlier findings of Herdegen (JMP 1996) and Strominger et.al. (JHEP 2014) concerning large gauge symmetries in QED. This is based on a joint paper with Michele Schiavina (CMP 2021).

We construct a Hermitian random matrix model that provides a stable non-perturbative completion of Cangemi-Jackiw (CJ) gravity, a two-dimensional theory of black holes in asymptotically flat spacetimes. The matrix model reproduces, to all orders in the topological expansion, the Euclidean partition function of CJ gravity with an arbitrary number of boundaries. The non-perturbative completion enables the exact computation of observables in flat space quantum gravity which we use to explicitly characterize the Bondi Hamiltonian spectrum. We discuss the implications of our results for the flat space S-matrix and black holes.