David Prinz (University of Potsdam) and Alexander Schmeding (Nord Universitet, Bodo, Norway)
Abstract: It is well known that the Poincaré group is the symmetry group of special relativity. In general relativity, sensible symmetry groups exist only for special spacetimes: the so-called asymptotically flat spacetimes. Here mass is concentrated in a compact region and the metric tensor decays to the Minkowski metric when going to infinity. Several groups have been proposed as the correct generalization of the Poincaré group in this setting. The most famous ones are the Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) group and the Newman-Unti (NU) group. We will briefly recall these groups and their relevance. It turns out that the BMS and NU groups are infinite-dimensional groups. We will present our recent results which establish the infinite-dimensional Lie theory for these groups.
Let me also take this opportunity to mention forthcoming talks by David Prinz (Potsdam) on Friday October 15th and October 22nd (tentative title: Hopf Ideals for General Relativity),by Marija Dimitrijevic Ciric (University of Belgrad, Serbia) on October 29th, by Rosa Preiss (University of Potsdam) on November 5th, by Claudio Diappiaggi (University of Pavia, Italy) on November 26th, and by Yannic Vargas (Unievrsity of Potsdam) on December 3rd.
For those of you who can and would like to join us, please meet us in the seminar Room 2.22 of the maths institute, where we can follow the talk together on screen.
You are welcome to invite your friends and colleagues to join us! If you wish to attend the talks, please contact Sylvie Paycha paycha@math.uni-potsdam.de for the login details.
