Gravitational Poisson brackets at null infinity compatible with smooth superrotations

Abstract

Superrotations are local extensions of the Lorentz group at null infinity that have been argued to be symmetries of gravitational scattering. In their smooth version, they can be identified with the group of diffeomorphisms on the celestial sphere. Their canonicalrealization requires treating the celestial metric as a variable in the gravitational phase space, along with the news and shear tensors. In this paper, we derive the resulting Poisson brackets (PB). The standard PB algebra of the news and shear tensors is augmented by distributional terms at the boundaries of null infinity, including novel PB relations between the celestial metric and the radiative variables.