Quantum Gravity

Recently it was porposed by Hawking, Perry and Strominger that an infinite number of asymptotic charges may play a role in the decription of black hole entropy. With this context in mind we review the classical definition of surface charges in 3+1 gravity (and electromagnetism) from a slighly different framework by using the tetrad-connection variables. The general derivation follows the canonical covariant symplectic formalism in the language of forms. Applications to 3+1 and 2+1 charged and rotating black hole families are briefly discussed as a check.

We consider classical, pure Yang-Mills theory in a box. We show how a set of static electric fields that solve the theory in an adiabatic limit correspond to geodesic motion on the space of vacua, equipped with a particular Riemannian metric that we identify. The vacua are generated by spontaneously broken global gauge symmetries, leading to an infinite number of conserved momenta of the geodesic motion. We show that these correspond to the soft multipole charges of Yang-Mills theory.

Calculating the path integral over all causal sets will take a lot of computing power, and requires a way to suppress non-manifold like causal sets. To work towards these goals we can start by taking the path integral over a restricted class of causal sets, the 2d orders.

A burst of gravitational radiation passing through an arrangement of freely falling test masses far from the source will cause a permanent displacement of the masses, called the ''gravitational memory''. It has recently been found that this memory is closely related to the change in the so called ''super-translation'' charge carried by the spacetime, where ''super-translations'' here refer to an unexpected enlargement of the asymptotic symmetries of general relativity beyond the expected asymptotic Poincare-transformations, known already since the work of Bondi et al.