Member Seminar

Speaker: Dan Kapec

Title: Hints of Flat Space Holography

Abstract: Despite our detailed understanding of holography in Anti-de Sitter space, flat space holography remains somewhat mysterious. “Celestial CFT” is a formalism which attempts to recast quantum gravity in (d+2)-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes in terms of a d-dimensional Euclidean conformal field theory residing at the conformal boundary. I will discuss certain universal aspects of this correspondence. As in Anti-de Sitter space, bulk gravitons produce a boundary stress tensor, and bulk gluons furnish boundary-conserved currents. I will also show that continuous spaces of vacua in the bulk map directly onto the conformal manifold of the boundary CFT. This correspondence provides a new perspective on the role of the BMS group in flat space holography and offers a new interpretation of the antisymmetric double-soft gluon theorem in terms of the curvature of an infinite-dimensional vacuum manifold.