Conserved Charges in Asymptotically (Locally) AdS Spacetimes

Abstract

When a physical system is complicated and nonlinear, global symmetries and the associated conserved quantities provide some of the most powerful analytic tools to understand its behavior. This is as true in theories with a dynamical spacetime metric as for systems defined on a fixed spacetime background. Chapter 17 has already discussed the so-called Arnowitt–Deser–Misner (ADM ) conserved quantities for asymptotically flat dynamical spacetimes, exploring in detail certain subtleties related to diffeomorphism invariance. In particular, it showed that the correct notion of global symmetry is given by the so-called asymptotic symmetries; equivalence classes of diffeomorphisms with the same asymptotic behavior at infinity. It was also noted that the notion of asymptotic symmetry depends critically on the choice of boundary conditions. Indeed, it is the imposition of boundary conditions that causes the true gauge symmetries to be only a subset of the full diffeomorphism group and thus allows the existence of nontrivial asymptotic symmetries at all.