General Relativity & Quantum Cosmology

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. For exact (global) symmetries it is shown to be explicitly equivalent with the 'invariant' symplectic method. Extension to Lovelock gravity are shwon. As an application the entropy expression found by Myers and Jacobson is recovered. [based on arXiv:1703.10120]

There is a growing list of examples where soft factorization theorems in scattering amplitudes can be understood as Ward identities of asymptotic charges. I will review some of these, with emphasis on cases that are not associated to usual conservation laws: leading scalar, subleading photon and sub-subleading graviton soft theorems.

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.

The observed deviations from the laws of gravity of Newton and Einstein in galaxies and clusters can logically speaking be either due to the presence of unseen dark matter particles or due to a change in the way gravity works in these situations. Until recently there was little reason to doubt that general relativity correctly describes gravity in all circumstances. In the past few years insights from black hole physics and string theory have lead to a new theoretical framework in which the gravitational laws are derived from the quantum entanglement of the microscopic information that is underlying space-time. An essential ingredient in the derivation is of the Einstein equations is that the vacuum entanglement obeys an area law, a condition that is known to hold in Anti-de Sitter space due to the work of Ryu and Takayanagi. We will argue that in de Sitter space due to the positive dark energy, that the microscopic entanglement entropy also contains also a volume law contribution in addition to the area law. This volume law contribution is related to the thermal properties of de Sitter space and leads to a total entropy that precisely matches the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for the cosmological horizon. We study the effect of this extra contribution on the emergent laws of gravity, and argue that it leads to a modification compared to Einstein gravity. We provide evidence for the fact that this modification explains the observed phenomena in galaxies and clusters currently attributed to dark matter.