Event

The Bondi-van der Burg-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) group is the asymptotic symmetry group of asymptotically flat spacetime.  It is related to flat gravity in the same way that the conformal group is related to anti de Sitter gravity.  However, while the conformal group is well known throughout field theory, the BMS group is rather mysterious.  We show that the BMS group is closely related to infinite dimensional symmetry groups governing fluid dynamics.  We use a relationship between gravitating systems and lower dimensional fluids on their boundaries to give a new derivation of the BMS group in three spacetime dimensions.