Adiabatic Solutions in General Relativity as Null Geodesics on the Space of Boundary Diffeomorphisms

Abstract

We use a trick similar to Weinberg's for adiabatic modes, in a Manton approximation for general relativity on manifolds with spatial boundary. This results in a description of the slow-time dependent solutions as null geodesics on the space of boundary diffeomorphisms, with respect to a metric we prove to be composed solely of the boundary data. We show how the solutions in the bulk space is determined with the constraints of general relativity. To give our description a larger perspective, we furthermore identify our resulting Lagrangian as a generalized version of the covariantized Lagrangian for continuum mechanics. We study the cases of 3+1 and 2+1 dimensions and show for the solutions we propose, the Hamiltonian constraint becomes the real homogeneous Monge-Ampere equation in the special case of two spatial dimensions.

This article summarizes and slightly expands the works in arXiv:2106.13268 and arXiv:1904.12869. To appear in the Proceedings of the 16th Marcel Grossmann Meeting (5-10 July 2021). Based on the talk presented in the parallel session "Mathematical Problems of Relativistic Physics: Classical and Quantum"